Guilt on Trial

...In the hands of a lesser writer this would have created a mishmash of solemnity and high-jumping ridicule that pretends to complexity but is just a leaking bag of incompatible attitudes...

...Nevertheless, pure, unassuageable liberal guilt consumes him like a tapeworm...

...Doctorow's ambitious failure...

...It is, however, becoming increasingly tricky to make out as an American-Jewish novelist and be original as well, the overriding fear being that everything has been said...

...Outrageously funny and dirty, murderously satirical, it takes on insufferably pretentious English commuters, American show-business expatriates in London, and upwardly mobile Montreal Jews with equal zest and precision...

...Mordecai Richler, with tolerance and rigorous irony, has written a masterpiece...

...GUILT of a more clear-cut political order should, but actually does not, come under scrutiny in E.L...

...A fascinating subject, surely, and many scenes are skillfully realized...

...Presumably, the principal focus is on the two children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, on their suffering before, during and after their parents' trial and execution for treason in the early '50s...

...Since nothing is ever allowed to become simple in Richler's scheme, Jake the sophisticated Londoner finds, on going home for his father's funeral, that he feels an incredible warmth for dull, orderly Canada, "where to say 'Gentlemen, the Queen,' was to offer the obligatory toast to Elizabeth II, not to begin a discussion on Andy Warhol...

...Jake's hyperbolic imagination has rendered the swashbuckling Joey not as the fourflusher and cheap con man he really is, but as a larger-than-life mythical avenger of his people, a crusader on horseback tracking down Nazis who are hiding in the jungles of Paraguay...

...Technically, Doctorow aims at a complex texture that becomes more irritating than effective...

...His Jewish mother is funnier than Mrs...

...For years this Superman-cum-Irgun vision triggered Jake's erratic attempts to find his cousin, who has always just flown the coop where he was last seen—Israel, Hollywood, Munich, Ireland...

...Born into the Depression, Jake was too young to fight in the War, is still too Jewish to feel at home in swinging London, too much of a sharp-witted loner to keep his faith in the intellectual dogmas of his youth...

...That fear must haunt Richler, a Canadian, as much as it does Americans...

...Italics mine...

...To write a book based on the Rosenberg case without once suggesting that they might have had something to do with an espionage ring is rather like writing about Alger Hiss without mentioning the typewriter that irrevocably exposed his lies...

...The hungry millions of India...

...It is a book that manages astonishingly to be at once loving, savage, contentious, slapstick, and profound...

...Jake has managed, however, to get himself into a mess that threatens everything he holds dear: He is soon to stand trial in the Old Bailey, charged by a nubile an pair girl with aiding and abetting sodomy, and indecent assault...

...If we knew nothing more of this couple's activities than what we are told in The Book of Daniel, it would be impossible to see their conviction as anything but the repressive witch-hunting it was made out to be before their 1953 execution...

...We cannot forget, as we read his novel, what Nathan Glazer pointed out in his study for The New Leader, "A New Look at the Rosenberg-Sobell Case" (Section Two, July 2, 1956): "There were in effect two Rosenberg trials, one of which was conducted in the courts and the other outside...

...The materials of Richler's novel are hardly unfamiliar to readers of Malamud, Bellow and Roth, yet what he does with them is entirely and hilariously his own...

...A novelist who tampers with details of history can do so with impunity...

...And, in his dream that only Joey had dared to do what liberals merely brood about, "above all, it was the injustice collectors Jake feared...

...Gradually, as the novel moves back and forth between Montreal in Jake's early years and London in the weeks preceding his trial, we begin to see that the man ultimately responsible for Jake's predicament is a long-lost cousin, Joey, whom he hasn't seen since childhood...

...Jake Hersh is a mildly successful tv and movie director in his late 30s, living a hectically affluent life of overdrafts and charge accounts in Hampstead...

...We do know more, however, much more than Doctorow tells us...

...He appears to have everything going for him—lucrative work, happy marriage to an intelligent beauty, three marvelous children...

...To be a Jew and a Canadian is to emerge from the ghetto twice," Richler wrote some years ago, "for selfconscious Canadians, like some touchy Jews, tend to contemplate the world through a wrong-ended telescope...

...Even if many people who pleaded for mercy for the Rosenbergs did not themselves confuse the two issues—guilt or innocence on the one hand, the death sentence on the other—the defenders of the Rosenbergs, in disregard of the facts, imposed this confusion upon them...

...Portnoy, not merely because her lines are better but because she is much more believable...

...Before, it seemed inconceivable that anything fresh or unique could be done with the guilt about Hitler's victims that presses mercilessly on the nerves of middle-class Jews in the New World...

...The concentration camp survivors...

...Jake was a liberal...

...Since he cannot reasonably offer the usual prefatory disclaimers about coincidental resemblances to persons living or dead—he makes bold use of many incidents and events as they stand in history—his refusal to confront the issue of the Rosenbergs' guilt robs the book of its crucial credibility...

...or the ugliness and vulgarity of the assimilated Jewish middle class...

...Although Richler was occasionally tempted into such narrowness in his earlier novels—the Jewish world of Montreal still obsesses him, as Dublin never ceased to obsess Joyce—he has by now emancipated himself from all provincial astigmatism...

...A far more significant reason for the novel's failure is the curious way Doctorow fudges the faots of the Rosenberg case...

...Harry in turn sets the trap that lands Jake in the dock...

...Doctorow frequently interrupts the erratic stagger of Daniel's memory with lectures on history and on forms of torture...

...Increasingly, wherever he turned, Jake felt his generation was being crushed by two hysterical forces, the outraged work-oriented old and the spitefully playful young, each heaving half-truths at one another...

...Verbal popguns and exploding cigars are always booming off, with wild logic, in the midst of Richler's most serious and desperately skeptical reflections on guilt, liberals, Jews, money, and sex...

...By any standard except his own guilty, amorphous apprehension, Jake's life is exemplary and enviable, light-years removed from Montreal's predominantly Jewish St...

...while the continual shift between first and third persons is supposed to reflect the disorder of Daniel's aching mind, the method fails to give the reader the necessary sense that the different lines bleed out of a single, if tormented, sensibility...

...London...

...In Golders Green, Jake tracks down a widow recently robbed and jilted by Joey, and through her becomes entangled with a slimy accountant, Harry Stein, whose favorite sport is making obscene phone calls to movie stars passing through London...

...The Book of Daniel (Random House, 303 pp., $6.95...

...still, the novel does not come off...

...Vrbain's Horseman (Knopf, 467 pp., $7.95) he has written the most brilliant and exciting new novel I have read in years...

...Though Doctorow sees the Rosenbergs for precisely the kind of mean-spirited pious party hacks they were, he persists in that stubborn confusion...

...or the painfully unbridgeable gulf between immigrant Jewish parents and their ambitious, educated, ironic children, tormented by exorbitant sexual fantasies...

...He is indeed a man on trial, but in more than the juristic sense...

...Richler's sorely put-upon hero, Jake Hersh, suffers the added disorientation of a Canadian expatriate who lives in London...

...But in his case it is now proved groundless, for in St...

...Urbain's Street, where he grew up...

...but one who changes or ignores its essence is indefensibly evading the truth...

...P.K.B...

...Several of these abstract reflections have a moving pertinence to the Isaacsons' tragedy, but many of them seem either playfully pompous or arbitrarily sensationalistic...

...Both brittle London and provincial Montreal, though, are made passionately alive by Richler's tender and blasphemous comic inventions...

...He had done all the right wrong things, even to marrying a shiksa, voting for the better candidate . . . and, squeezed in a vise between the moral values of two generations, worrying about Arab civil rights in Israel, on the one hand, and kids having to make do with impurities in their pot, on the other...

...The elder child, here named Daniel Isaacson, is ostensibly writing a PhD thesis at Columbia, but what he is really setting down is this book, a doomed attempt to purge a rage and pain too deep for purging...