A Gift for Casuistry

...of his protracted arguments is magnificent, as a Dostoevsky might have made it Thus intense dramatization sometimes saves the ideas...

...He manages the usual elements and devices with skill and often with bravura??the play-by-play action scene, the meditative or stream-of-consciousness passage, varied by prayers, dreams, quotations, and imaginary letters to Henry Adams and others, the party scene with chatter, the close-m, soul-searching interview He makes his characters distinct to the imagination by odd gestures and postures, even calisthenics In a crisis the heroine has to rush to the toilet Or she lies naked with a book on her belly and eats potato chips as she converses The hero picks his nose or pulls at it, and smells his fingers after intercourse...

...Fortunately not always In many cases Curley resolves abstract discourse into very gripping drama, as in the fine scene where the heroine's girlhood sweetheart, now a dedicated business man, lectures her implacably on the current state of her morals He is pompous and so a little funny, but the dramatic weight...

...Another solution might have been the witticism or epigram that stands up on the page, but in spite of a certain buoyancy of manner, Cur-ley's passing remarks are just not funny to me As an Irishman Curley cannot be without wit His wit, however, is that of a very good raconteur, and it is not expressed in epigrams or gag-lines, but m the actual turn of events in a story His account of an attempted rape is wonderful comedy, told with Rabelaisian elation and cinematic bazam, while the wording is perfectly dead-pan...

...A Gift for Casuistry NOWHERE MAN By Thomas Curley Holt, Rinehart, and Winston 347 pp $5 95 Reviewed by DONALD SUTHERLAND Author, "Gertrude Stein A Biography of Her Work" The good old naturalistic novel is just like England saturated with a pleasant variety of local detail, nice to rest in, and even if you do not like it you would hate for there not always to be one Moreover, it is torever being declared m a parlous state, and many think it must be saved from itself or transformed by lyricism or by fantasy, by symbolism or by political purport, by sheer style or by a philosophical thesis Thomas Curley is aware of all that, but he is that anomaly, a reasonable Irishman, and though he derives a little from James Joyce, he plays the traditional novel quite straight, as if it could still sustain itself without radical innovation of form or content Well, m his hands it does...

...So are ideas Inevitably, naturalistic characters live in more dimensions than their immediate adventures and so entertain general ideas and exchange them In this novel they think about politics, about religion, about literature, about morals, and so on, naturally The difficulty is that thoughts which feel very bright and apt when they occur to you turn out as often as not to be the most abject commonplaces when written down And conversations, dazzling and exhilarating in fact, can be idiotic when transcribed or closely imitated I find much of the thought and talk in this novel not merely uninteresting but, precisely because it is mostly a faithful representation of how people do think and talk, depressing and humiliating to the species The opinions the characters have about the Catholic faith or Dr Castro, about the arts or the Establishment, are all too natural...

...Although the mixed moral quality of man is routine doctrine and the close analysis of specific cases m those terms more edifying than exciting, the realization of those terms primarily in events, in a craftily managed sequence of inner and outer actions, gives the book an immediacy and vitality of its own It may have been done before, but not to my knowledge The hero's best friend, the troubled source of most of the intrigue is like no one else I know in fiction He is capable of the vilest villainies, partly from a refinement of benevolence, but at the same time is far from limited to that paradox or the one motive...

...The plot is neat and gracefully conducted It is not so much a triangle as a hexagon or better, allowing for a good variety of relationships and confrontations, switches and surprises A woman of 40 has left her husband and children in the Boston area to live with the hero in New York, is pregnant by him and is variously pursued by others with still other connections by the best friend of the hero, by a girlhood sweetheart of hers, by his wife in passing, and of course by her husband who still loves her At the beginning of the book she learns she is pregnant and at the end she has the child In the meantime there is a great deal of extremely intricate intrigue, some of it very wicked and lurid, most of it interesting for the exceptional ambiguity of motivation...

...It is for a kind of casuistry that I think Curley is most gifted I gather he is or has been a Boston Catholic and so is habituated not only to the principles of Good and Evil but to their most concrete and most deceptive manifestations This much might result merely in complex portraits, with the worst baddies having a virtuous streak and the best goodies having a vicious streak, in rounded or multi-dimen-sional characters, as the handbooks recommend But Curley does something better and, I believe, new The odd mixtures of good and evil in the characters come out in unexpected and often baffling actions, and the result is a very absorbing suspense story of moral behavior...

...There is very little description of people or of streets and houses that is not absorbed into action, gesture and motion Yet the visual side of the story is steady It is not rich and exhaustive in the 19th-century manner, but the gradual accumulation of little touches, telling or colorless does situate the characters m a spatially realized New York "Boats of various sorts plied the harbor and up and down the East River " While in itself this is about as perfunctory as description can get, a host of these minimal observations keeps the city present...

...Curley's title indicates this is in part a study of the detached or negative man, m the tradition of Hamlet and Obloinov and the alienated heroes of Camus The case of the "nowhere man" is interesting and sometimes fascinating in a creepy way, still, it suffers from the superior interest of his best friend, who as his foil is not the usual simple man of action but a wildly multifarious one, a sort of "everywhere man " By rights Curley should have heightened the hero's case, instead he nearly sinks it This is because the author's gifts, if not his sympathies, are on the side of the action rather than the inner life Technically the hero does have an inner life??is a poet, as a Catholic convert and as a compulsive analyst of everything??out his inner experience is not rendered with anything like the vividness of the outer events I may be mistaken about that, though The Catholic's inner life never sounds at all inner to a Protestant, and even Cardinal Cushing's reading of Latin prayers for the dead can sound, to the infidel ear, about as vibrant as a laundry list At least the excitement in Curley's novel of the outward and manifestly moral action, and of the thought and talk directly focused on it, is obviously high and should not be lost on readers of whatever morality...

...The prose is plain, with only a few modest ventures into magniloquence and tropes, or into the manners and mannerisms of the characters as they think or talk or, occasionally, write If in general it is pedestrian, it keeps the narrative going at a brisk or swagger gait With some use of picturesque locutions from the lower vernacular, it stays fairly close to English as it is commonly used in real life by literate people for practical purposes Curley puts his best form and his distinction of manner not into the wording but into the conduct of the story, of scenes, of transitions and "cutting " This is his third novel, a proficient one, and he must know better than I what he is doing I assume he holds a theory, not untenable since it is commonly held, that in a naturalistic novel the narration itself can be the substance of the expression while the wording can pretty safely be left "natural" I think not, though I admit a more splendid wording might have compromised the directness of the content and encumbered the movement That is a standing problem, not for Curley alone...