Elusive Perfection

...In the ambitious title story that fills more than half the book, Miss Kaplan moves out beyond the Bronx shtetl to write of a lonely and emotionally crippled young woman, Louise Weil, long before abandoned by her refugee parents in a Westchester mental hospital to gather dust like a forgotten umbrella...

...Miss Beal rather loads the ironic dice here, but no matter...

...But the most affecting portrait in the story-it made me squirm with embarrassed recognition and reluctant pity-is that of Rebecca Relkin, a garrulous old radical who taught high-school French for 35 years, then retired to an antiques shop in Rockland County which she runs with dithering incompetence...

...In her first novel, Amazon One (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 299 pp., $7.95), M. F. Beal, who teaches in California and lives in Oregon, takes powerful possession of an area of recent American experience that has been curiously neglected by writers of fiction-the lurid lives of the Weathermen, the revolutionary cadres of the late 1960s who, in attempting to bomb the corporate headquarters of American capitalism, were seduced by the old anarchist dream of precipitating Utopia through terrorist cataclysm...

...She has a sharp but affectionate eye for ultraliberal hypocrites and upwardly mobile families that finally make it from Intervale Avenue to Mount Vernon, so their snotty children can brag: "I don't live in the disgusting Bronx any more...

...and if it is the most ambitious of these three books, it is, as well, the only one that genuinely goes wrong...

...Time is changin, mon...

...are arranged in the shape of a ship's mast...

...The others frantically go to ground when the police, who have been tapping their phone for months, issue warrants for their arrest...

...Amazon One captures every grim and comic nuance of the guerrilla mentality with merciless dramatic clarity: the self-important exhilaration and nauseating terror, the reliance on grass, speed and cocaine to stoke courage, the chaotic despair and dogmatic rage, the infantile scatology and sinister animal menace...

...In fact, Rebecca runs so greedily off with Miss Kaplan's story that the disturbed heroine all but sinks out of sight...

...The fishermen's West Indian dialect is interrupted now and then by Matthiessen's portentously spare descriptions of weather, sea, birds, and the few turtles that bother to crawl into the Eden's nets...

...another contains a single word, "horizon," with a wavering line below...

...On one page some unevocative phrases ("trade wind, rain glitter, wind, sun, wind," etc...

...In the end, only C.B., the one bona-fide proletarian in the lot, is caught...

...But so accidental is the rock's appearance that the destruction of the Eden and its crew seems wholly factitious rather than tragic...

...I think he meant that novels, as the literary form most closely resembling reality, can never attain the compressed formal perfection of poetry...

...Nonetheless, if an author deals with a particular experience more honestly and imaginatively than it has ever been dealt with before, what goes wrong becomes unimportant...

...She has now been sent to live "normally" with Maria Tobey, a German-born woman whose husband is dying...

...However, Johanna Kaplan's stories in her first book, Other People's Lives, abundantly prove that the chicken soup has not yet turned into water...

...Kam (short for Kamikazee) Wright, reviling the aloof middle-class propriety of her academic parents in Oregon, worships death through the brutal pantomime of karate, and savors the sensuous egotism of the criminal life...

...As far as I can recall, only one other novelist, Alan Lelchuk, has written about these bomb-intoxicated extremists-and in American Mischief he exploited the subject with pornographic malice...

...It doesn't seem possible that any literary vitality can still be squeezed out of Jewish life in the Bronx-or indeed any other borough...

...C.B., the uneducated and rebellious daughter of a sadistic Army sergeant, is a pathetic and confused ex-con, who simply drifted in with the others after her release because they offered a temporary haven in a period of hopelessness...

...In his new novel, Far Tortuga (Random House, 408 pp., $10.95), Peter Matthiessen recounts the catastrophic last voyage of a decayed Grand Cayman schooner, the Eden, fishing for green turtle off the Nicaraguan coast...

...Miss Beal knows this embattled underground with flawless intimacy-the drugs, the rock argot, the pompous political rhetoric...

...while Marina, through her father's money and connections, is whisked safely off to exile in France...

...It is a small price to pay for a masterly character...

...To his splenetic abuse the men shrug their indifferent reply: "Modern time, Doddy...

...The tatterdemalion crew has been hastily patched together by Captain Raib Avers, a brooding "backtime man" who mourns "de old days" before Yankee yachts began crowding the native fishermen and their prey out of their own waters, when real turtlers manned his ship instead of "two drunkards, one thief and five idiots...

...Marina Karsh, the wealthiest and most articulate member of the group, was converted to violence during the 1968 upheavals on the Columbia University campus...

...Frozen into torpid passivity by all the years of chronic rejection, Louise has become a mute observer of other people's lives, and Maria's tempestuous and crowded existence in a West End Avenue apartment house devours her canny and envious attention...

...We de best dey is...

...Soon after the strategy meeting, while the women are ripping off a supermarket, the house where they have been living and manufacturing their explosives blows up, killing two of the men...

...Even more important, she has written her story from inside the enraged minds and bodies of four young radical women living in Berkeley during the spring of 1970...

...And no sooner has the dust and blood settled than Marina is pushing herself "to write something for the media . . . send it out quickly, before the world accepted whatever it was the government chose to say...

...Without condemnation or apology, Miss Beal has brought this once threatening, now derelict, world together, hitting a central nerve of truth that should make her book required reading for present and future generations of the radical young...

...Dressed in a bizarre collection of Villagey imports, she looks "like a package that had been sent on from one wrong foreign address to another, receiving at each mistaken customs office its country's distinctive stamp...

...Careless children of television, they can't wait to catch the explosion, the death of their comrades, the FBI announcements of their "most-wanted" names on the evening news...

...They can easily get out of hand, veer off in unpredictable directions, become uncontrollably messy...

...Writers & Writing ELUSIVE PERFECTION BY PEARL K. BELL "A novel," Randall Jarrell once wrote (and his definition has a certain reckless wisdom), "is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it...

...In Miss Kaplan's hands, Rebecca becomes a grotesque, exasperatingly poignant avatar of the Jewish-radical heyday in prewar New York, sentimentalizing the past and berating a present that finds neither pity nor patience for her tattered memories and insatiable narcissism...

...She is put away "for an indeterminate sentence...

...Where did the rock come from...

...When, at the disastrous climax, the ship strikes an unexpected rock off Far Tortuga, a cay not found on any chart and most likely "a mere dream and legend of the turtle men," the page reads in its entirety "the ship strikes...

...Though Far Tortuga has been deliriously praised by such early readers as James Dickey and Eleanor Clark, in my mind it has already turned into 408 pages bereft of any words or deeds or moral I want to remember...

...It was put there, of course, for the symbolizing convenience of Peter Matthiessen, whose prose has been holding its breath until terrible mortality could take its mythical toll...

...Yet, as Miss Beal brilliantly demonstrates, these fiery enemies of American hedonism are at the same time enthralled by its ritual intensities...

...Far Tortuga is also full of unfortunate typographical experiments...

...In the course of her extended monologue, Rebecca nostalgically recalls "those enormous fantastic fund-raising dinners" she used to give for doomed political causes, and complains bitterly about the pampered insolence of today's young, who never knew the suffering of the Depression...

...Many of the pages are literally agape with blank white space that I suppose is meant to symbolize the blind infinity of the sea...

...Jersey Carmody, a lesbian and would-be novelist, sees the homemade bombs as the ultimate weapon against a sexist society...

...More astute and self-aware than the other fugitives, she candidly tells a reporter from an underground paper: "The media has [sic] been our witches' tit, and we have been sucking it nightly to enjoy how bad we are...

...The book opens as the four women and three men, led by a half-demented Jewish graduate student from Queens, are planning to deposit bombs in strategically important business centers of San Francisco...