Search for Neutrality
MALPEDE, KAREN
Search for Neutrality Farragan's Retreat By Tom McHale Viking. 311 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Karen Malpede It is impossible to summarize the subject of Tom McHale's second novel without calling...
...Anna's wake takes place during the Chicago Democratic Convention: "It was well known, after all, that Anna was a Communist-hater...
...He is not simply a victim, however, for by choosing passive conformity he must share the guilt for society's atrocities...
...Unwanted by wife or mistress, unheeded by son, separated by the death of Anna and Jim from the detestable yet certain order of his family, the man whose every action was a reaction simply ceases to exist...
...Arthur is incapable of carrying out the execution, but he is equally incapable of defying Jim and Anna...
...She epitomizes the seemingly benign old Catholic lady wearing lace-up shoes, a black dress, and single diamond chips in her pierced ears, whose greatest pleasure is visualizing the number of black Cadillacs likely to be present at her funeral...
...In fact, the bomb that killed her--along with Jim and Father Edmund, a dimwitted fourth brother--was set off not by Communists or hippies, but by respected members of the middle class driven to desperation...
...Simon retaliates by becoming a draft-dodging hippie in Canada...
...Cruelly ignoring her husband, she manipulated the Farragans' small construction company into a monster trucking concern...
...Everyone in the room seemed willing enough to give the Negroes the benefit of the doubt...
...She instilled in her next born, Jim and Anna, an unyielding patriotism and sense of righteousness that terrorizes everyone around them...
...Her coffin picture is a constant prop whenever Jim and Anna demand that their brother, Arthur, do something completely untenable, like give up his mistress or even kill his son...
...Though Arthur wishes the Vietnam war would end, he refuses to accept his son's actions against it...
...But he describes Arthur's death and the death of the Right-wing fanaticism he unwittingly supports with a ferocious understatement that makes the tragic fate of both seem inevitable...
...Although he deserves better, suicide seems the inescapable end to Farragan's Retreat...
...she satisfies hers through a secret but awesome cuckolding...
...McHale does not detest Arthur...
...he has made him the only fully drawn character in a novel populated by mercilessly articulated grotesques...
...They are terribly devout, in the sense that all the crises in their lives have been amply lit by votive candles and their feelings of unity with the human race stop abruptly with non-Catholics...
...Then he drives his son out of the house upon learning that Simon has made fun of instead of love to the daughters of gangster Emilio Serafina--nubile twins who have centered in Arthur's erotic fantasies...
...Today the war and its consequent politicization of life have demolished the quiet neutrality he seeks...
...Their mother, though dead before the novel begins, casts her pall over the entire proceedings...
...Yet by combining the time-honored tradition of the ethnic novel with the new consciousness the Vietnam war has brought to American life, he has written humorously, even intelligently, and without compromise on these unpromising topics...
...Arthur so reveres his "goddess wife" that he covers the religious statues in their bedroom each time they make love and is left to satisfy his prurient interests by repeated voyeurism...
...The ethnocentricity for Farragan's Retreat is supplied by the offspring of an Irish Catholic matriarchy in Philadelphia...
...It was either the Communists or the hippies, then...
...So he participates in weekly target practice while hoping to persuade Simon to flee to Europe...
...A merely average man, possessed by minor doubts, Arthur, trying somewhat earnestly to make sense of things, typifies the apolitical anti-hero of the "silent generation...
...If they are the devil's agents in this updated morality play, he is the hypocrite...
...During World War II, she dragged her eldest son to the induction center and sent him off to die in battle because she had caught him making love to a boy...
...Arthur follows them to the grave of his own accord...
...It is Arthur's misfortune to be slightly more sensitive than his brother and sister...
...Reviewed by Karen Malpede It is impossible to summarize the subject of Tom McHale's second novel without calling up stale cliches about the "divisiveness in our society" or "the generation gap...
...When he writes a letter of condolence to Ho Chi Minh shortly after his cousin's death in Vietnam, the superpatriotic Anna and Jim order his father to shoot him...
Vol. 54 • April 1971 • No. 7
