Transient Pleasures
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers &\^ting TRANSIENT PLEASURES BY PEARL K. BELL A A ^ ll through the dying fall and barren winter the eminently forgettable novels (with a few nourishing exceptions) came and went, trying...
...But May is the crudest month, for most of these novelists of renown, it turns out, are just dragging their feet through the same old routines...
...Impudent, relaxed, uncannily astute and meteorically ar ticulate, Sheed performs wonders by giving his inex haustible store of first-rate wisecracks the rare sheer and flawless look of genuine cultured pearls...
...This second half of the novel ("The Perkins Papers") is related by Sam Perkins, a young Harvard activist who fastens on the Senator as he steamrollers toward the Democratic Presidential nomination, a potentially successful peace candidate against Nixon...
...A fertile comic imagination is only the beginning of wisdom, and because Sheed did not reflect unhurriedly on the human and moral issues that he grazes but won't make the effort to grasp, the puzzle of Brian Casey never acquires the shape, depth and uniqueness of one individual different from all others...
...5) John Cheever, forever tracing his invisibly melancholy silhouettes in the Ma-maroneck gloaming...
...Actually, People Will Always Be Kind is two quite different novellas unsuccessfully lashed together as a single book...
...But Foreign Devils is still another book about writing a book (must novels, like supermarkets, be flooded with background Muzak...
...As he consistently proves with every word he sets down both s novelist and as critic, he is the prince of gag-writers sharp as a tack, bright as paint, quick as a whip...
...After the doctors and hospitals and priests and muddled relatives and quacks and worthless sanitariums are done with their pinchbeck cures and promises, he must confront an inescapable reality: "His legs were a wasteland where no life would stir again...
...charm, ruthlessness, greed, and dishonesty...
...Faust's wildly irrepressible mayhem cannot save his book from the tedium of familiarity: the girls, the mother still running the candy store, the Army, the estranged shiksa wife, the father defeated by the Depression...
...instead, he's writing a rousing adventure tale about intrepid Norris Blake, China correspondent for the New York World in 1900, the first American reporter "to see and report the awful catastrophe the world has come to know as The Boxer Rebellion...
...4) Philip Roth, still batting on his schticky wicket in the Jewish cricket league...
...3) Iris Murdoch, churning out her annual Oxbridge variation on Schnitzler's La Ronde with yet another severed head...
...Out of the vision comes a cynical blueprint for a political career, and 20 years later, Brian Casey is a Washington eminence, a liberal Senator from New York, sleek and devious, a foxy pol to the marrow...
...To the reader entirely without Yiddish, a great deal of Foreign Devils will be so much Chinese...
...Though these books of Sheed and Faust are great fun to read, most of the time, their goals are too transient and undemanding...
...The author squirming on the rack is Sidney Benson (ne Birnbaum), disloyal son of West 181st Street, who after a four-year writing block is finally going to outsmart the critics for allowing his first novel (total sale: 635) to sink without a trace...
...Sam finally quits the campaign out of disgust with his "Catholic Sammy Glick...
...Jesus Christ, supergimp...
...These days the real thing is more apt to be found in minor novels-for one example, Wilfrid Sheed's People Will Always Be Kind (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 374 pp., $7.95...
...Let the smartass critics look for hidden satirical depths in Blake's daredevil escapades...
...The trouble is that Faust insists on including every boring picaresque episode of Benson's mock-heroic novel Boxers, alternating its Pulitzer-prose chapters with Sidney's own 1973 echo chamber of memories and, as he says, tsuriss...
...That was manhood for the handicapped...
...After becoming Casey's constantly outraged but fiercely loyal house prig and whipping boy-the kind of high-minded puritan Casey likes to employ "because they would do dirtier work for nothing than low-minded people would do for hire"-sam slowly and disheart-eningly discovers that his "peace" candidate neither can nor will be made to fit the idealistic stereotypes...
...I am therefore not going to review the new fiction by (1) Muriel Spark, whose Hothouse by the East River makes me wonder, and not for the first time, whatever happened to the genius of Memento Mori and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie...
...The novel is fatally inconclusive, because a novelist who fails to distinguish between a character's genuine ambiguity and his own shrugging indetermination simply has not done his job...
...the polio victim's lust for vengeance, the brutal tongue, the unfathomable mix of blasphemy and piety...
...Casey sincerely believes what Sam first takes as banter: "Honesty is just a form of rhetoric...
...In the first half, which is often deeply moving, we learn what happened during the early 1940s to a lively New York adolescent, Brian Casey, who is stricken with polio...
...Sheed's Identikit portrait of Brian in middle age makes malevolent use of the worst in Eugene McCarthy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, in George McGovern and all three Kennedys...
...This time around, now that the block has crumbled, the hell with your sensitive-young-Jewish-intellectual losers...
...Writers &\^ting TRANSIENT PLEASURES BY PEARL K. BELL A A ^ ll through the dying fall and barren winter the eminently forgettable novels (with a few nourishing exceptions) came and went, trying to irrigate the desert with an eye-dropper...
...A ? similarly pernicious irresolution takes its toll in Foreign Devils (Arbor House, 295 pp., $7.95), the new novel by Irvin Faust, who in several earlier works was an even funnier writer than Sheed...
...Now comes May, lilacs and Big Names busting out all over, and suddenly there is rain enough for drowning...
...What at first appears to be an embarrassment of riches turns out to be the last scene of Treasure of the Sierra Madre...
...But at a certain moment he must leave the company and withdraw, alone, to that mysterious room where his body is hardened and fashioned into permanence...
...Is there any other writer who could manage to be authentically funny— and it's not black humor-about two of the least funny subjects imaginable, polio and politics...
...It isn't what politics is basically about...
...Wha makes his new novel worth reading with cautious seriousness is that many of the gags really are pearls-mischievously profound insights and putdowns that he tosses around like so much confetti...
...As the curtain falls, raucously disdainful laughter can be heard from the greenroom, but this time the joke's on them...
...Casey remains a batch of index cards that duly note his wit...
...Sheed's book made me laugh out loud so often that I almost forgave this normally shrewd and incorruptible critic for his demented praise of Alan Lelchuk's American Mischief...
...By forcing the reader to forge his own connections between the shattered young polio victim of the first half and the Machiavellian schemer of the second, Sheed is not being subtle but lazy, preferring to let his notes for a political novel (i.e., the bottomless well of one-liners) stand in for the work itself...
...In a tormented vision of Christ, he decides, after a humiliating involvement with a Columbia Marxist club, "to be so strong and make such a statement that, if you were dead in a ditch with your legs and arms beside you, people would spit on you...
...and also a book within a book...
...Sidney Benson will rake in the royalty checks...
...But no more than James Joyce can Brian let go of the Church, or pry its bony fingers loose from his personal cross...
...2) Kurt Vonnegut, once again parlaying the two-and-a-half tiny ideas in his dog-eared stock portfolio into a boom market of sci-fi whimsy...
...Only when he discovers Bertrand Russell's "needle of doubt" as a Columbia undergraduate does he begin to break through the papist cage...
...Yet even at 16, Brian, like his creator, is a gushing fountain of one-liners, sassing his way through pain, rage, grief, bitterness, and trying with acerbic generosity to get his helpless, guiltily over-solicitous Catholic parents off the hook...
...Instead of doodling their gifts away, such abundantly talented writers ought to remember Virginia Woolf's warning that the novelist "must expose himself to life...
...As an old friend of Casey's delicately puts it...
...he must risk the danger of being led away and tricked by her deceitfulness . . . and let her trash run to waste...
...One could (they do) go on and on...
...That book, which Sam will probably never produce, is the one Wilfrid Sheed should have written...
...and the grand parade of movie stars-the only genuine mythical heroes for televisionless kids who spent every Saturday afternoon in the darkness of the Loew's being gloriously devoured by Leslie Howard and John Garfield...
...And both the memories and the tsuriss, although written with superb comic gusto and a marvelously controlled balance of farce and feeling, have all been handled before in too many New York Jewish novels by writers now on the dark side of 50...
...and starts interviewing people for a book that will tell the truth about Brian Casey...
Vol. 56 • May 1973 • No. 11
