Slogging Through a Sahara
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing SLOGGING THROUGH A SAHARA BY PEARL K. BELL It seems a simple rule, but in fact it is not: A serious novel that leaves its reader unchanged, though his mind may for a while...
...Rather, I mean the consciousness and sensibility of the reader being enlarged and altered by a powerful force of creation, a metamorphosis through the responses of reading...
...Hugo Lenz, a lonely and unsuccessful poet with a bad leg, fattens his tiny inherited income by translating pornographic books for a shady publisher...
...he had no notion of them...
...Regionless my placeless vowels, my sourceless consonants...
...A third-rate professor of English at a bush-league community college justifies his hopeless infatuation with a 10-year-old pop singer: "Helen of Troy was nine...
...An interesting idea, but Hughes has neither the imagination nor the intellect essential to the writing of "history as nightmare," in Irving Howe's perfect rubric for 1984...
...And while the participants have a physical presence, they seem as spectral as the listeners...
...They were as faceless to him as he to them...
...Only one even begins to meet the requirement of change--Stanley Elkin's The Dick Gibson Show (Random House, 335 pp., $6.95), a bizarre and maniacally funny account of a perpetually apprenticed radio announcer whose elusive vision of success is one of perfect neutrality, the disembodied pseudonymity of the amplified human voice: "And where did I grow to manhood...
...More serious is Elkin's self-indulgence, letting jokes that are too broadly vaudeville to begin with go on for much too long...
...What Graham Greene calls "entertainments" are worth reading, for altogether different reasons...
...Where Elkin's use of obscenity is witty, sharp and obedient to his purpose, Speicher is the prisoner of his gutter language, obsessively mired in its by now un-shocking simplifications...
...Assumed briefly, it is shed as he moves phrenetically in the '30s and '40s from one small-town station to another all over America "because I want to make myself worthy of my voice...
...These days a young novelist's sights are less likely to be turned inward than out and beyond, in Orwell's image, to the unspeakable prophecies of the anti-utopian future...
...This final section of the novel, a sorry and ludicrous vocal parade of the halt, the lonely, the mad, and the blind, is the least satisfactory, in part because it is so overtly derivative of Nathanael West...
...In Dick Gibson's world, the most pernicious of enemies is silence...
...Some years later, Dick Gibson achieves the headiest triumph of his career--and sets his ultimate destruction in motion--with a program called "Night Letters," a burlesque Miss Lonelyhearts of the air whose listeners phone in their monstrous confessions and sorrows, holding nothing back since they cannot be seen...
...Hughes' subtitle is "A Novel of Cessation...
...Lame Duck is what was once called a "poetic novel," elaborately figurative and supported to the straining point by intricately arranged flying buttresses of metaphor...
...In Elkin's hands the talk show becomes a freak show, but disturbingly more familiar than anything one would find in a circus...
...Writers & Writing SLOGGING THROUGH A SAHARA BY PEARL K. BELL It seems a simple rule, but in fact it is not: A serious novel that leaves its reader unchanged, though his mind may for a while remain cluttered with fragments of name, place and incident, is not worth reading...
...And since everything in the book is rendered through Didman's woozy incoherence, one is either adrift in a drunk's hallucinatory astigmatism or repelled by his fatally constricting self-pity...
...They didn't even have a voice...
...Hugo, with all his yearning and anxiety, is not tragic but pathetic, and his suffering has no reverberations of moral urgency...
...On the all-night orgy of talk--which almost immediately turns into uncontrollable confession--a pharmacist divulges his lust for female customers with embarrassing ailments...
...If The Dick Gibson Show delighted me for the exciting freshness of its satiric laughter, John Speicher's thoroughly overpraised Didman (Harper & Row, 262 pp., $6.95) merely made me irritably impatient...
...A future English government has decreed the end of the human race, now only a few weeks away...
...And because Ends hasn't enough melodramatic inventiveness to make the grade as futuristic entertainment, it falls into the trap that most novelists do not see until it is too late--the gray boredom that leaves the reader as it found him, inert, untouched, the same...
...It was abundantly clear in Stanley Elkin's first novel, Boswell (about a celebrity-gobbling lionizer), and in his second, A Bad Man (about the formidably wicked Leo Feldman, whom everyone wants to improve and reform, and who must fight like hell to remain a true bastard), that his genius consists not in surrealistic displacements of reality but in blowing up the real to the bursting point, whence truly effective deflation follows...
...The radio audience is intangible and even accidental: "He could not depend upon his listeners...
...This is also the brilliance of Elkin's scheme in his new novel...
...I defy you to say...
...Middle-aged, the end of his apprenticeship in sight, Dick Gibson comes into his own as a "radio personality" with that ominous phenomenon of 20th-century entertainment, the talk show...
...many people, stubbornly irrational beasts, insist on choosing their own means of death instead of waiting passively for the collective end to come...
...His style--or lack of it--consistently hobbles his rage...
...Elkin reveals more about the somber underbelly of contemporary life by comic improbability than Speicher does with all his tape-recorder documentation...
...Still, in a time when so much fictional writing is clumsy, inept, or merely haphazard, the pleasures of Beekman's descriptive gifts are not to be slighted...
...E. M. Beekman's Lame Duck (Houghton Mifflin, 242 pp., $5.95) is a fictional world light-years removed from Elkin's reckless satire and Speicher's putrescent damnation...
...Twangless and drawl-less and nasal-less . . . ." Dick Gibson isn't his real name, only his favorite among a dozen announcer's aliases--"that name that had come to him out of the air, the best inspiration of his life, consolidating in its three crisp syllables his chosen style, his identity, a saga, a mythic body of American dash...
...I have recently been slogging through a Sahara of new novels, most of which seemed little more than impertinent intrusions on my attention...
...for this reason the book is curiously static...
...Radio, that crackling din of voices competing for the increasingly rare silences to erase, becomes a shudderingly funny blueprint of American popular culture, and of the way mass media distort and eventually eradicate the distinctions between public voices and private souls...
...There are moments when Hugo is endearing and funny, yet he never attains the tangible and sensuous exactness of the brilliantly clean city he views from his aerie on an old canal...
...or an unprecedented urge to think and behave in new ways, although these may sometimes seem to occur...
...Enraged by the squalor and depravity, he stumbles drunkenly into a black-revolutionary plot to blow up the Stock Exchange, and, oh happy guilt, suicidally agrees to become the plotters' instrument of destruction...
...Most of the time, however, as in Ends, the new English novel by James Hughes (Knopf, 227 pp., $5.95), what begins in the hope of future shock quickly turns into sci-fi schlock--pretentious melodrama that is more trash than terror...
...The middle-class Wasp liberal of the title is out of a job (quit in idealistic indignation), separated from his wife, and living, because the rent is cheap, in a verminous slum of New York, "a city that served a nation as a latrine...
...He is a herd of alters in search of an ego, sound bereft of substance, ears without eyes...
...The speech of Speicher's blacks is pathologically foul to the point of coprolalia, which the author confuses with realism...
...So was Heloise when Abelard fell for her...
...Self-mocking and bereft of love, Hugo is haunted by night-winging spooks of terror, botches the one love affair that promises any permanence, and at the end is poignantly alone again with his cat...
...Some of this might have become fictionally plausible if Speicher had devised a less conventionally naturalistic way of venting his splenetic fury at the horrors of ghetto America...
...Although Beekman now lives in the United States and writes in English, this novel is about his native Amsterdam, and only a rich sense of place gives the book its erratic vitality...
...By change I do not mean a startled gasp of recognition ("So that's what the human condition--predicament, tragedy, maze, rat-race--is all about...
...Novels about lonely and sensitive dreamers are now the exception, though not so long ago such fictional portraiture--impressionistic, amorphous, tentative--was tediously commonplace...
...But this seems a minor flaw in a book that makes such profoundly comic gold out of one insidious and omnipresent junkheap of American life...
...A troubled and intelligent journalist, David Parry, is torn between the illegally intransigent rebels trying to die in self-ordained ways, and the great mass more than half in love with the easeful, legal death that will be imposed upon them...
...And what about Little Red Riding Hood...
Vol. 54 • April 1971 • No. 7
