Caged Man
WATKINS, MEL
Caged Man CURLING By Robert Boles Houghton Mifflin. 259 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by MEL WATKINS Staff member, New York "Times Book Review" Some readers will find narrator and protagonist Chelsea...
...The author's allegory materializes through the gradual decomposition of Chelsea's "adopted" existence...
...Chelsea is the urban Negro in microcosm...
...The story occurs during a single weekend...
...The events constitute little more than a framework, however...
...Afterward, Chelsea, Roger, the girl and another friend stop briefly at the zoo...
...Finally, Chelsea is more than a Negro estranged from his society by a denial of his past and the reluctant acceptance of a borrowed culture: He reflects the plight of modem man stifled by the limitations of his own civilization...
...Finding the old man dead, the party disperses...
...The child of a husbandless, "hysterioal or dumb" woman who dies at his birth, he is named simultaneously bastard and Chelsea Meredith Burlingame...
...Others will object to Robert Boles' laboriously raveled style...
...Released, he returns to Boston, his old friends, and his adopting society...
...Their faces reappear in his dreams...
...As the narrator admits, "The story might or might not have begun that Friday gray and snowing Boston afternoon...
...And as Chelsea gradually acknowledges and confronts his peripheral existence, so the Negro, particularly in the last decade, has become aware and militantly opposed to his marginal acceptance...
...As his foster father adopted him and cast out the son who out of spite had named him, so has America adopted the Negro and attempted to purge its history of 400 years of atrocities...
...Still, one leaves Curling with an indelible impression of the subliminal anxiety .that modern society inflicts upon its creators...
...Adopted" by a family and society who eventually reject the son that named him...
...Within his adopting society, he is neither rejected nor accepted...
...Essential to his fantasies are the Negroes he befriends or sees during his infrequent walks through Boston's slums—those to whom he has become a stranger...
...He yearns for bygone days when men fought for their land and families and carved their identity out of nature's rawness...
...But if you accept Chelsea—a New England Negro adopted by a wealthy, white, Boston family—and if you submit to the exacting entanglement of events, memories and fantasies rendered in Boles' stream-of-consciousness narrative, the effort will be rewarded...
...She gives herself to him only temporarily...
...He possesses nothing, no history, no present, no future...
...With their appearance his estrangement grows, until he is completely rent with time, his surroundings and himself...
...Chelsea plays mental games with himself, inventing different lives...
...he is merely tolerated...
...For Chelsea the perception is overwhelming...
...They spend Saturday afternoon horseback riding and, in the evening, attend a party at the home of a wealthy friend...
...I have no idea how long it took, but it was as long as my history and as complete as had been my love for Meredith...
...He deserts his friends and sets out on the desperate search that leads him to New Bedford...
...he remains an outcast and feels more kinship to the ousted son (also named Meredith) than to the family...
...That Robert Boles has successfully drawn his character without the bathos that usually accompanies such a portrayal is largely due to his narrative technique—the constant overlapping and interweaving of reality and fantasy, creating in the reader a dislocation and feeling of suspension well suited to the material...
...There, like the protagonist of Camus' The Stranger, he commits an irrational murder, the act vindicating his estrangement...
...He is a caged man and, like the animals he observes in the deserted zoo, he briefly acknowledges his plight, then yields to its inevitability...
...Chelsea is a man with nothing of his own...
...The surfacing awareness of his predicament, the acknowledgement of his estrangement from both himself and society, dictate his ultimate yearnings...
...I beat him until all of my anger had vanished and until he was silent...
...Imposed on the happenings, like cryptic embroidery, are Chelsea's memories and subconscious fantasies...
...One pictures an impressive boxer who, having got off a series of classic jabs and combinations, is unable or unwilling to deliver the finishing blow...
...Reviewed by MEL WATKINS Staff member, New York "Times Book Review" Some readers will find narrator and protagonist Chelsea Meredith Burlingame unbelievable...
...He is a nephew visiting a Southern family of tenant farmers, or a slave chained with his brothers in the hole of a slaveship...
...He wanders about the Negro slums, visits a museum and finally takes a bus to New Bedford, where the weekend finishes with a violent encounter between Chelsea and a local hoodlum...
...He is El Greco's Fra Felix Hortensio Paravicino, or an adored lover, or the son of the old man who freezes to death within the partially completed walls of a building he helped design...
...The decision to place it there is arbitrary...
...He is arrested, but thanks to his foster father's name, the death is considered accidental...
...His last remark is: "Life is small and silent, is, at times, a composition recognized and left to rest...
...His name, his family, the property he has inherited, his job, all have been given to him: they are mere contingencies...
...There Chelsea leaves them...
...Chelsea meets his friend Roger and a girl with whom they have both been intimate...
...For often he nudges you unsuspectingly into sudden awareness, and these small accumulated insights form a montage that gives the novel strength...
...It is not only the marginal acceptance offered by his society, but also the narrow confines of the role demanded by the society that force Chelsea's awareness of the inadequacy of his existence...
...At times, though, the narrative voice is too deftly restrained...
...Gradually, they amass, tearing apart his delicately poised security and forcing self-revelation...
...Even Anne, the girl he loves, belongs to his friend Roger...
...Later, drunk, Chelsea leads some of the guests to a construction site where he had earlier discovered an old Negro sleeping...
...they are relatives or intimate friends...
Vol. 51 • April 1968 • No. 8
