Casual Notations
ZEIGER, HENRY A.
Casual Notations ONWARDS! By Nat Hentoff Simon and Schuster 141 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by HENRY A. ZEIGER Contributor, "Harper's," New York "Times Book Review" Nat Hentoff, polemicist for the now...
...It is entirely possible that Hentoff does not regard his New and Old Leftists as really ridiculous...
...Therefore, when I turned to his new novel, Onwards!, I wondered at what point I would heave it at the nearest wall with a cry of: "Begone, with your murky prophecies of instant apocalypse...
...For another thing, the book exists from moment to moment as a string of sketches, composed mainly of dialogue and the musings of the narrator who is worried about his sex life, death and the extent of his commitment...
...the plot doesn't amount to much—will he or won't he place his body on the line for draft resistance...
...While there are a few smiles along the way, the scenes are always attenuated and the characters drift off just when the groundwork has been laid for some comic fireworks that would finally explode into the really lunatic zani-ness of true comedy...
...Characters float in and out of focus, existing mainly as glosses in dialogue form on the narrator's obsessions...
...What could be...
...constantly wanting to go to bed with his wife, Kate (a picture of marriage as frustrated sex and bickering...
...He is, after all, one of them and he certainly approves of the chronic opposition to society as presently constituted that most of his characters exhibit...
...Thus the novel is surprisingly modest...
...That, I am afraid, is what I continue to wonder...
...For one thing, the mode is comedy...
...and the scenes themselves are over before they begin to wear...
...Unfortunately, the sit-in takes place when the induction center is closed for renovation, and Aaron catohes cold and goes home before he can be arrested...
...If Onwards...
...and conversing with aging radicals...
...bugged by Levine, a student in his course on alienation (Levine is the kind of student who is against grades...
...But as the book ends he is delighted to discover that the fbi is taking an interest in his activities...
...It is all so inconclusive...
...My forebodings were increased as I read the book jacket copy: "Onwards...
...Well, it isn't that dismal...
...While Aaron chats with the leaders of the Left about revolution, sex and dying, he moves through an interrupted meeting, a nervous approach to Black Power in a Harlem bar, and an abortive demonstration to a final confrontation with the authorities as part of a sit-in at an induction center...
...The central flaw is that Hentoff is either unwilling or unable to leap beyond the ordinary and give his milieu sufficient style for the true knockabout farce that much radical posturing can support...
...There is certainly plenty of material available for a truly gigantic comedy of the Left, and if Hentoff did not think it all that funny, one wonders why he produced this book...
...and he himself, faced with the new politics and his own advance into middle age, begins to realize that he must find his own ways to act politically and to affirm the meaning of his existence...
...his students prod his fading liberalism...
...To put it plainly, Hentoff is not very funny, the characters are predictable and the dialogue, which carries much of the burden in this kind of book and is reliable enough when it is noting the bread and butter business of ordinary living, turns into inflated rhetoric once matters of more significance are involved...
...One cannot question the necessities that lead a writer to put something down on paper, yet one must doubt the wisdom of stuffing something like this into an envelope and handing it to a publisher...
...His complicated wife hits at his irresolution...
...Even so, he indicates that he knows something of the stiff-limbed posing and the compulsive rigidity of our native opposition which often produce confrontations of screaming hilarity in the real world...
...does not really irritate, it certainly does not enlighten...
...This method of casual notation of unformed events, and perhaps some little limitation in Hentoff's comic imagination, has not permitted him to compose a novel of very much substance...
...is about a fortyish New York intellectual caught between the men of the Old Left—the white haired labor leaders and visionary pacifists who have been 'marching' for forty years or more?and the new activists, the dropouts and the Black Power advocates...
...Hentoff sees that neither Old nor New Left can be taken at quite their own estimate, and is somewhat amused at the contradictions between high-minded revolutionary resolve and the requirements of fife...
...If there is a kind of mild comedy, there is no liberating laughter...
...What we have is Aaron Phillips, the narrator: opposed to the Vietnam war (of course...
...Reviewed by HENRY A. ZEIGER Contributor, "Harper's," New York "Times Book Review" Nat Hentoff, polemicist for the now and future revolution, can be a considerable source of irritation...
Vol. 51 • August 1968 • No. 15
