Nuggets of Gold amid the Dross

...Alice eventually learns to her sorrow that the reality of modern Spain is more complicated than love, and at the end she dies of a botched abortion...

...Feibleman is a New Orleans writer whose earlier work has been consistently acclaimed with a perfervid chorus of critical hallelujahs...

...When the Polish monarch forbad the continuation of this ancient ceremony, the Jews resigned themselves to deleting the gesture from their prayer books, but Rabbi Eliezer, who alone among his people "had really mastered the elaborate, highly figured speech of the court," volunteers to go and plead with the King...

...Terence de Vere White's The Distance and the Dark (Gambit, 277 pp., $6.95), at least in its first half, is a witty and authentic portrait of a pocket of Ireland I previously knew little about...

...And his mocking talent for deflating fools, snobs, and gossips makes The Distance and the Dark a pleasure to read...

...For her setting, she has chosen the Polish court at a deliberately vague point in the past, and for her model she has gone to the Hasidic parables...

...Gradually, Rabbi Eliezer breaks down the King's resistance...

...On the strength of this novel and of Judah the Pious-two nuggets of gold in a mountain of publishers' dross-perhaps novels are still worth writing and reading after all...

...His bottomless store of hypnotizing tales about the demonic and the miraculous, and his moving anecdotes of Jewish life, win Casimir to his cause...

...On both counts, Miss Prose's judgment has served her extraordinarily well...

...Alternatively, Connolly argued (the year was 1935) that there be "an enormous extension of the censorship-not simply libel and obscenity would be taboo, but whole landscapes, whole strata of our civilization would become unmentionable...

...Rabbi EKezer of Rimanov, an unlikely 89-year-old Scheherazade in "a tattered robe of heavy black wool, not unlike the torn shrouds which sometimes hung from the backs of dying women in charity hospitals," has come to the court of young King Casimir to plead a special case for the Jews of Poland...

...For many hours this shabby old fabulist, resting his bones on the throne while the King sits at his feet, weaves a spellbinding net around his enchanted audience of one with his stories about Judah ben Simon, the apostate son of the village malamud, who was determined to lead the life of a rational skeptic: Born to middle-aged parents, Judah scorned their supernatural explanation of his birth and abandoned family and Judaism for the forest, to dedicate himself to the scientific investigation of nature...

...In Judah the Pious (Atheneum, 279 pp., $6.95), Francine Prose, who is still in her 20s, has sensibly and boldly turned her back on all the contrived and derivative junk that beclouds the mind and cripples the pen of the vast majority of novelists today...

...But the snare of magic pursued Judah into his fastness in the form of Rachel Anna, the strange young woman he married, who had six fingers on each hand and a different color in each eye...

...This was one reason among many why The Columbus Tree stood out with unusual promise from the huge and uninviting mass of new fiction that has recently come my way...

...Before I read Peter Feibleman's The Columbus Tree (Atheneum, 472 pp., $8.95), I would not have put that first item on my Index of Forbidden Subjects...

...These superstitious simpletons concluded that, with this gesture, the Jews "were tantalizing their ghosts into coming back from the other world and stalking innocent people...

...Although I am not in the least sure of the ultimate meaning Miss Prose wants her parable-within-parables to convey, she tells it all with such effortless panache that I can't wait to see what this brilliantly original writer will do next...

...The clothes, sexual behavior and slang may change, but underneath it's the same baloney, and I would strongly support an immediate moratorium on novels about Americans in Europe, homosexual anguish in Iowa, universities in turmoil, wife-swapping in Ipswich, middle-class dropouts, identity crises, faculty-wife discontent at Harvard (Princeton, Yale), "communication failure," and middle-aged professors of English who leave middle-aged wives for juicy young graduate students...

...Thirty-eight years later, most novelists are still writing with dreary self-absorption, locked into a fruitless repetitive narcissism that they justify with slogans like "the death of the past...

...In his account of Everard Harvey, a decent man of reason caught in a cross-fire of fanaticism because he dares to question the unthinking pro-Unionist bigotry of his lifelong friends and neighbors, White shows the appalling personal cost of Northern Ireland's savage civil war, even to the Irish outside its boundaries...

...Schools and universities . . . words like Daddy, love, marriage, baby, birth, death, mother, buses, shops...

...Feibleman's updated version of Daisy Miller, the Jamesian innocent abroad, is Alice Littlejohn, a not-so-innocent young American, neurotic and rich, who tumbles into a passionate affair with a liberal Spanish aristocrat more than twice her age...

...To his immense credit, White brings this Anglo-Irish world alive in a very human way, despite inhabitants who are far from admirable...

...Yankee, go home...

...Though one can hardly call The Columbus Tree a political novel, the brutal activities of Franco's police state form a dark and sinister undercurrent in the movement of the story...

...Because his new book takes place in 1957, not in the all-holy Time: The Present that so infatuates novelists of the 1970s, I thought it might provide a salutary respite from the solipsistic ego-mongers who hog the American fictional scene today...

...But when the present troubles of Ulster begin to explode uncomfortably close to home, this smug world is rudely awakened from its anachronistic pastoral sleep...

...Remarkably, Miss Prose manages her difficult juggling act in a style of heightened simplicity that she controls superbly, never slipping into pseudofolksiness and somehow doing the fullest justice to the subtly devious intelligence of Rabbi Eliezer and Judah, and of King Casimir as well...

...The dramatic encounter of American innocence and European experience has of course been one of the great enduring themes of American fiction since Hawthorne...

...Feibleman has spent a good deal of his adult life in Spain, and in The Columbus Tree he attempts an un-inhibitedly melodramatic but echt serious book about the tragic destiny that can engulf rootless and romantically incautious American travelers...

...In this close-knit backwater of great landed estates, near the northern frontier, amassed hundreds of years ago by forever-English emigres to the island, the gentry of the present day still clings to noblesse oblige and its traditional feudal remoteness from "the Irish"-though it is Irish too...

...Almost half a millennium later, Feibleman heavy-handedly reminds us, the New World has reversed the great navigator's direction, and is now conquering and defiling the Old, leaving a sordid wake of dollars, pidgin English, and moral corruption wherever the affluent American tourist takes his pleasure...

...As the summer sun sets on picturesque, mysterious Andalusia, we bid farewell to as synthetic a piece of stylish hokum as I've read since Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet...

...Not long before, some Polish noblemen had noticed that at a Jewish funeral the mourners tossed handfuls of dirt back over their shoulders at the grave...

...Feibleman, however, has none of the campy baroque lyricism that did much to mitigate the nonsense of Alexandria, and he brings none of James' compassion and insight to the familiar theme...

...With the compass of his title pointing due west, Feibleman sets his story in and around the Andalusian port of Sanlucar, from which Columbus set sail on his second voyage to the Americas...

...Writers & Writing NUGGETS OF GOLD AMID THE DROSS BY PEARL K. BELL A t the low ebb of a singularly dismal literary season, I find myself looking back to an old essay of Cyril Connolly's, "More About the Modern Novel," in which he half-seriously suggested that "no new novels be published for three years, their sale forbidden like that of plovers' eggs...

...Later, when Judah went off on a scientific quest for several years, Rachel Anna bore a son, conceived, she insisted, in a dream...

...In that intimidating pile of new fiction, only two books-one by a young American writer, the other by an established Irish novelist of manners-even begin to demonstrate what a marvelously satisfactory literary form the novel can be...

...On this dubious ideological ground, they remain densely impervious to the fact that the themes and methods they believe to be so revolutionary and earth-shaking are in truth hackneyed and stale...

...The fertile source of the bulk of Henry James' work from Roderick Hudson through The Golden Bowl, it continued to be a lode of tremendous richness not only for the between-wars titans like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but also for more recent writers like William Gaddis and John Hawkes...