An Anatomy of Fraudulence

...Charmless, inept in speech, this dismal lot is scorned by shoeshine boys, giggling neighbors, bartenders—they simply cannot ingratiate themselves with anybody...

...Wolff works up to quite an impressive show of violence as Caxton destroys his father's possessions and Freeman breaks Gerrish's hand with his new blackthorn walking stick...

...Reviewed by ISA KAPP Toward the end of Bad Debts, its main character, Benjamin Freeman, 55 and separated from his wife, takes a minute and elaborate inventory of his belongings...

...In the Washington, D.C...

...In the novels of Kafka, there is a strange anonymity in the characters, an unnatural vacant space around them—but we can, through our identification with their situations, endow them with specific lifelike qualities...

...The speech of this minor executive as he fires Caxton—puzzled, exasperated and under control—rings true and gives us some notion of how much better the book might have been were Wolff more dedicated to observation of the outside world and more relaxed about pushing internal symbolism...

...Clothes, tape recorders, cameras, ice cream makers, toothbrushes—he wants an exact accounting of his assets...

...Despite this national handicap, Wolff means, I think, to present Bad Debts as a kind of anatomy of fraudulence...

...This frightening little novel gives us more of a clue of what hell, rather than earthly life, may really be like...

...Bad Debts, which introduces us to four characters bumping about in a loose and grudging familial bond, achieves a gray naturalism of the soul that makes the pages of Theodore Dreiser seem positively to rock with romance...

...Matching his predilection for plainness with the demands of modernity, he settled, in this disciplined short novel, for the unflattering exposure of the candid camera, and an incredibly flat and grating tone...

...But his fabrications refer us, much the way an injured-bone pain is "referred," to another, unnoticed area, in this case, to the more noxious frauds of the conventional world: the swindles of political fraternization, the expectations of parents, the merits of jobholding, the common stratagems for making a good impression—the artifices we know and can't sacrifice...

...We may as well ask how this came to pass, as wonder how all of Charles Dickens' Joe Gargeries and Peggoties came to have such a thoroughly delightful way with themselves...

...He smolders with imaginary and real slights and composes aggrieved replies to his creditors: "My dear sir: I have received your vulgar letter...

...Freeman taunts Gerrish about his silly undershirts, derides his wife because she is too dumb to complete a jigsaw puzzle properly...

...they are meant to be, I greatly fear, your taxidriver and my lawyer, the man in the street...

...he had fought his history and won...

...He didn't claim to have felt up girls whom he hadn't, and he hadn't yet reached into a bra or a pair of pants by the time he graduated...

...Gerrish did not give Freeman enough money or faith, Freeman did not give him tolerance...

...Like the contemporary drama Walter Kerr recently described as supplying all those irrelevant details playwrights traditionally left out, Wolff likes to place his hero in front of the bathroom mirror...

...like Caxton, Wilhelm falls into low spirits and a halt in his career, and recognizes his father's contempt...

...Caxton, a Princeton graduate, is valued by the Budget Bureau and the Defense Department for his computer qualities: his feel for crucial fact, his unwillingness to listen to gossip, his not leaving parties too late, his not having freckles along with his red hair...

...Justice Holmes was a fine touch...

...A frivolous complexion is not esteemed in Washington...

...If we don't take Wolff's moral indictment of society as seriously as it was intended, it is because he neglected to give us an alternative...

...His son, Caxton, choosing a career in politics, goes through a similar process, adding and subtracting his virtues with eerie detachment...

...This humbug, this boor, this fish, this moron, Wolff seems to say of his barbarous quartet, what can they expect...

...We think immediately of Tommy Wilhelm in Saul Bellow's moving and perfectly constructed Seize the Day...

...Is that oxblood on your shoes, Maurice...

...One more demonstration of your disrespect will bring a brigade of my solicitors to your door...

...His wife, Ann, soft and receding as a jellyfish, has escaped to a small house in Dan-bury, there to be tranquilized by tv programs and tasteless bric-a-brac...

...Underneath a certain flamboyance of diction and dress (he comes to the door of his New York apartment in walking shorts, dark glasses and red wool socks) lurks a thoroughly objectionable man who wants to mortify the few people he is close to, at the same time that he tries to extort money and affection from them...

...Freeman prods his cousin in the last scene, echoing the jeers of a lifetime...

...Freeman and Caxton are not just ant'heroes...

...One must marvel that Wolff has found four characters to write about who fit this remarkable description...

...So grim is Wolff's conception of our time that he has one-upped all the sordid literature about liquor, drugs, sadism, and insanity...

...But not, to be sure, you or me...

...More, he was a creator...

...But when Bellow creates a weak or misdirected hero, our interest follows because Bellow genuinely believes that unprepossessing people deserve the chance to win respect and fulfill themselves...

...He is also apt and quite amusing when he formulates Caxton's disingenuous appeal for a job in a letter to a Republican congressman...

...I liked it," he placidly reassures the wincing Caxton...

...His history was a desert...

...He made things out of nothing...

...There is no opposing self, no fall from splendor, and, to put it bluntly, moral fervor is not his best suit...

...The taste of sand was in his mouth...

...We are given a strong sense of the fortuitous nature of political alignments and of the vast impersonal drone of activities supporting those few colorful figures who finally manage to awaken the public interest...

...This is precisely the nature of novelistic condescension, a feeling very much the opposite of Camus' in The Stranger, where Meursault, the man who cannot please though his life depends on it, is in essence ourselves...

...When we try to call fraud, we become simple-minded, a country of Holden Caul-fields spotting phonies as though we were playing slapjack...

...It is true that modern fiction has been original in pu'ting forward characters who lack boh the means to be likable or successful and the glamor that goes with wickedness...

...As it turns out, the congressman knows he was fired for spreading tales and now wants him mainly to help in an expose of the Defense Department...

...His quartet, joyless, loveless, lying without purpose, and unbelievably sterile, takes us into drearier depths...

...Wolff apparently took a careful estimate of the deposits in his creative bank, and made a cautious investment...

...A braggart and crackpot, full of wild schemes and gratuitous pretenses (his curriculum vitae claims Exeter Academy, Oxford and a top secret government job), Freeman lives on credit, fantasy and insolence...

...His son, Caxton, is an asthmatic, sexless automaton who observes that he does not have "the means to be liked...

...In Bad Debts, the furnishings and the lifelike qualities are abundant, but we endow them with an anonymous terror...

...scenes, away from family and heavy thematic innuendoes of who owes whom what, the language becomes authentic...

...and neither father nor son would give the other admiration...

...No doubt, deception makes a good tissue for fiction's tears, but it seems more properly to fall into French than American territory...

...But he feels his true merits have gone unacknowledged, and since he is in many ways an oblique chip off the old block, he fabricates a pointless lie about his boss for the newspapers...

...Wolff's Freeman represents the part that lies needlessly, the imposter in us all...

...Why, then, he would spit it out, raise mountains against the remorseless horizon, fill lakes with cool water...

...There all is bitterness and free-floating animosity...

...Freeman thought of himself as an entertainer...

...His cousin Gerrish is a crude and irritable lawyer who advises a young man: "Leech on to big business or the government: that's where the greenbacks grow...

...Even the cultivated toughness of the language provides a disturbing note in its struggle to prove that the truth is drab and harsh...

...There is something too mathemetical about all this, something intellectualized—reverbrating the grotesqueries of Nathaniel West, but without his nervous sincerity, the inflection and oppressed manner of Saul Bellow, but without his conscience and vitality...

...Moreover, Aristotelian principles are not wholly lost since, if not the readers, at least each member of the quartet has his cathartic realization that the others never paid up what they owed...

...It could not have been easy...

...And he is a part of ourselves that is worth more speculation, the part that cannot lie even when it is expected...

...Objectivity is, and the best touches in the book are those that come of dispassionate note-scribbling...

...It explains that he resigned because he did not want to waste his energies in a bureaucracy, laments the erosion of individual will, and quotes Thoreau and Holmes...

...Good God, don't you know anything...

...But adept as Wolff is at grinding the tawdry tunes of the Washington merry-go-round, his heart is really in the highlands of family passion...

...And it looks as though, in order to arrive at the off-beat modesty of his first novel, Geoffrey Wolff (for several years book critic of The Washington Post and now book editor at Newsweek) had to submit himself to the same kind of methodical drawer-cleaning...

...Like the Europe of armed camps before World War I, this domestic state of affairs, too, must come to a head...

...Ann did not give Freeman vivacity, he did not give her sex or serenity...

...Moreover, he implies, the world is full of such people...

...It's no time, he seems to have reasoned, for nobility of character, large iniquities, generous fascinations...

...In one of our early encounters with Freeman, he is literally rubbing lime lotion on his cheeks, working up a Jack Palance expression, and planning to testify that his Wilkinson steel blade has broken the Gillette record of 309 shaves...

...Outrageous though Freeman's fibs are, his motives prove poignant and innocent...

...Even Freeman's wedding "was perfunctory and sullen . . . the musicians were undanced to . . . the bride wore black underwear, the groom needed a shave...

...The three who suffer his indignities have, in their turn, little to recommend them...

...In Bad Debts, the characters wail that the world owes them love and money, but it's hard to believe their author will back them up...