From Brooklyn and the Bronx
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing FROM BROOKLYN AND THE BRONX BY PEARL K. BELL The astonishing thing about Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's superb first novel, Falling (Macmillan, 307 pp., $6.95), is that she emerges...
...Father Michael is shepherd to bigoted policemen, lusty Italian mothers, three beloved acolytes-A wasp, a Puerto Rican and a black-A rich alcoholic couple from Westchester, capriciously worshiping in the Bronx, and the Evans women...
...Schaeffer chronicles this stumbling metamorphosis with an unerring grasp of the contradictory details necessary for the universal mosaic: families and individuals, parents and children, life and death...
...Stubbornly fixing her penetrating sights on material that anyone in his right mind knows has been done to death-jewish life in Brooklyn, graduate school, attempted suicide, psychoanalysis, and scrabbling in the family dirt for the Holy Grail of the self-mrs...
...She doesn't know her dress size, and her do-it-yourself bookshelves rain down on her innocent sleep at 3 o'clock in the morning...
...Miss Dikeman is at her best in depicting the odd, combustible, brawling domain of the parish...
...For all the verbal fireworks, too, a vital unity of tone is sadly lacking...
...Her mother and her grandmother, Belle, "pried the doll out of her hands, and broke it in pieces, and using old bakery string, tied the arms and the legs and the body together, dangling, like rabbit's feet...
...After his first wife dies, he plunges blindly into an affair with the incurably neurotic Dorothy, who eventually commits suicide...
...The young kook eventually is transformed into an endearing person of depth and value, and Mrs...
...Every time you pass that doll,' Belle said, 'you'll think twice about stealing.' " Somehow, despite these nasty stabs, Elizabeth did not desert her intelligence and her robust bravery...
...She is a writer of uncommon talent and honesty, blessed with a natural command of humor and perception, and she has crafted one of the most engaging and genuinely funny books I've read in years...
...Partly to provide his small daughter with a mother, Father Michael weds the child's teacher, a beautiful simpleton, but this marriage is quickly revealed to be as much a mismating as his first...
...Schaeffer's, it is filled with high-pitched melodramatic busy-ness...
...He matches her clout for clout...
...He has just informed her, in a manner reeking of smug rationality, that he does not love and will not marry her...
...Although May Dikeman's long and ambitious novel, The Devil We Know (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 408 pp., $8.95), seems to grow out of a more complex and multifarious sense of language and experience than Mrs...
...They live in a squalor of decaying junk and leaking pipes, a psychotic gentility superbly well observed by the author: They "kept everything because it was 'nice,' or 'might come in handy,' or 'you don't see these any more.' . . . Not only the routine string, paper bags, and cartons did they keep, but package handles, all foil bakery or frozen-food containers, plastic flowerpots . . . blown light bulbs . . . everything that broke in case it might be mended...
...Its prose, an odd mixture of purple and colloquial, is unrelentingly skittery and excited, the kind of writing that can be a great strain to read...
...In Falling, for a realistic change, the Jewish family is not a warm dumpling bobbing cozily in a sea of chicken soup...
...Writers & Writing FROM BROOKLYN AND THE BRONX BY PEARL K. BELL The astonishing thing about Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's superb first novel, Falling (Macmillan, 307 pp., $6.95), is that she emerges in triumph from a risk that most young authors would not even consider worth taking...
...The scene is a decaying, dizzyingly various lower-middle-class neighborhood in the North Bronx, where Father Michael is curate of the Holy Family Episcopal Church...
...But if the neighborhood's minor figures are drawn with enormous gusto, and possessed of a confident, lively power, its center, the minister-saint, is overidealized and obscure, a romantic stereotype...
...It was part of her "symptomatology," he needled, "that she would come downtown dressed as if she were going to pick apples in a blighted orchard, or clean out the hospital sewer...
...When Elizabeth wakes up in the hospital to face apoplectic parents demanding to know why, she can only stammer that she hasn't the slightest idea...
...For Elizabeth grew up in a fox nest of malice, bigotry, spite, and more than a little primitive brutality...
...Characteristically, she first frets about whether to send back the engagement presents, then casually takes 75 sleeping pills and lies down under a window, waiting for the end...
...Valora Evans, a dotty old Englishwoman, shares "the oldest farmhouse in the Bronx" with her spinster daughter Dorothy, who is crawling with forbidden yearnings for the handsome curate...
...Beneath its unassuming plainness, the obligato of Elizabeth's eccentric, realistic sensibility resonates strongly on every page...
...Lustily sexual as well, this urban cleric has a bad head for women, which involves him in ill-judged emotional relationships that tend to subvert his impassioned zeal for social reform...
...He is joylessly married to a prissy young woman, killed in a freak accident a third of the way through the book...
...From that lowest point she can only move up, and stand up to life, accepting the not-so-grim challenge of necessity...
...Rather too obviously, this busy Bronx pocket of New York City is meant to be a microcosm of contemporary society, a reflection of what Father Michael sees as a new Age of Herod, overflowing with poverty and drug addiction, crime and stupidity, greed and war...
...Still, from this acrid tug-of-war emerges a zany kind of salvation...
...In her ninth year at the University of Chicago, where she earned a BA and is now, with a klutzy air of serious offhandedness, working for her PhD in literature, Elizabeth lives in an extravagantly messy apartment with her fiance, Mark, a cold and pompous psychologist...
...Her heroine is 31-year-old Elizabeth Kamen, a disheveled young woman with a genius for accident and finding the kind of men not even a mother could love...
...As a little girl, Elizabeth stole a quarter to buy a plastic doll...
...She often felt the cutting bite of her father's belt, and when she misbehaved on car trips, she was put out and told to find her own way home...
...the omnipresent saint-hero, Father Michael Morrow, should pull the crowded urban panorama together by means of his ardent temperament and nagging existential problems, but unfortunately does not...
...Father Michael, a saint without sanctimony, is the throbbing moral pulse of this rampageous and engrossing little world...
...Mired in their Collier-brother detritus, they only keep adding to the junkheap...
...It will be a miracle if that child lives to grow up,' Belle predicted, gloomily," but once burned, Elizabeth will not again be tempted by high windows or sleeping pills...
...He is a deeply committed radical who marches in antiwar demonstrations and has burned his draft card at a mass protest in Central Park...
...Then they had nailed the pink doll to the wall...
...In fact, her parents are a large part of the reason-Though they would shriek their innocence at the highest pitch of hysteria in the face of the most damning proof...
...Falling is at once poignant, hilarious and luminous...
...Even the language goes maddeningly opaque in the images applied to the curate ("an arrow labeled penumbra in his corneas"), as it never does in the passages about the Evanses or the acolytes...
...Consenting to see a psychiatrist only under the gun of the law (suicide is illegal), Elizabeth hurls insults at his carapace of neutrality with tearfully comic ferocity...
...Miss Dikeman's intimate knowledge of theology and clerical duties notwithstanding, her "parfit, gentil knyghte" never acquires the density and stature of a fully realized character capable of binding the brilliant yet disparate parts of her novel into a persuasive whole...
...What makes her different from the aggressive huntswomen of liberation who populate so many shrill female novels these days is her hunger for conventionality, her eagerness to admit how deeply satisfying a smoothly functioning life of husband, home and children can be...
...In the end, frustrated by his church superiors and sadly misjudged by the parishioners he has worked so hard to succor, he sloughs off the fetters of institutional authority and goes forth to found an independent, radical ministry more in keeping with his sense of a true vocation...
...Parents resent their children, children hate their parents, and everyone makes a wholehearted effort not to be nice...
...Elizabeth is the reductio ad absurdum of bohemian antivanity, swaddling her sexy body in lumpy home-sewn upholstery fabrics...
...Schaeffer has managed to establish a mar-velously original claim to these tattered topics...
...The abortive suicide was her last concession to the treacherous world of the loser, the last "falling" into the void...
...For, as greater writers have learned to their sorrow, it is sinners, and not saints, who infallibly provide the realm of fiction with its apotheosis...
...His parishioners, however, more than make up for a dull wife and domestic ennui...
Vol. 56 • August 1973 • No. 16
