Music in the Monologues
KOENIG, RHODA
Music in the Monologues You Could Live If They Let You By Wallace Markfield Knopf. 182 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Rhoda Koenig Editorial staff, "Harper's" Wallace Markfield's new novel is a...
...Some examples: "She sponsored her for the group therapy group...
...Some years ago, for instance, I had to return something to Best & Co., this is when Best & Co...
...The book jacket contains a picture of Markfield looking literary and distinguished, but I think you would do well to get rid of it, for the cover art is really abysmal...
...She has a permanent maybe once a year on her Easter...
...His sister, Lillian, suggests that she holds Marlene responsible: "I started to hint of this...
...Being a Jew helps in understanding it, and so does being a New Yorker...
...It escalates when she cuts up Farber's grandfather's talith to make Mitchell an Arab costume for Halloween...
...Gandhi...
...Her housekeeping is so unspeakable that, in the course of their marriage, she only lit the oven twice, and once was a suicide attempt...
...who sent for you and who asked for you?'" You Could Live If They Let You is, if I haven't already made it clear, a wildly and brutally funny book that finds insanity in every aspect of middle-class life...
...When you go back-and there's no rush...
...Markfield's humor, however, is not, as Henry James described George Sand, highly accessible...
...That's some woman...
...And it climaxes when Marlene invites members of the press to witness Mitchell's induction into the Church of Christ Therapist...
...Reviewed by Rhoda Koenig Editorial staff, "Harper's" Wallace Markfield's new novel is a series of interviews, encounters and collisions with the late Jules Farber, a stand-up comedian who makes Lenny Bruce look like Averell Harriman...
...In each case, the unnecessary word or phrase sent me into fits of laughter where someone else might sourly ask what was so funny...
...I said, 'Well, she did him in.'" The novel is narrated by one Chandler Van Horton, an academic who sets out to tape Farber's "thoughts on modern comedy and comedians...
...When Marlene separates from Farber, she takes along their autistic son, Mitchell, whom she turns into an instrument of vengeance...
...Lacey of the Nay-Sayer magazine and Jerold Insdorf, author of America: Land of the Sad Clown, who called Ed Sullivan "the featureless hierophant of kitsch" and labeled comics "ironymongers...
...In your country-I bet in your country you don't see too many women like Mrs...
...You know Mrs...
...I'd say try the book anyway...
...Gandhi...
...Soon thereafter, Farber drops dead of a heart attack...
...you won't appreciate Markfield's perfect pitch if you don't know his music...
...was still in business...
...A tradesman in what Norman Podhoretz has called "the quality lit biz," he shrivels such pedants as I.M...
...A nice little beggar's bowl...
...Because you're from India, you're an Indian kid, right...
...Yes sar...
...Yes sar...
...Farber's own life is something to scream about: He is married to an ex-stewardess, Marlene, the ultimate shikse menace, whose first words to Farber are, prophetically, "That will be a dollar, sir...
...Her campaign against her husband starts when she sends Mitchell to visit his father with a pamphlet attacking circumcision, then with a hook called Great Jewish Traitors...
...Here is Farber terrorizing a visitor from India on a TV talk show: "Monsoon, monsoon," he cried, and "Famine," and "Khyber Pass...
...he makes audiences shriek with laughter by saying what they're embarrassed to think...
...Farber drags the unconscious, kicking and screaming, out into the light...
...It seems to have been done by Jerold Insdorf under another name...
...The monologues are crazier and sharper than anything you'll see on TV, and the energy level, sustained for almost 200 pages, is something to wonder at and admire...
...Gandhi...
...Van Horton also quotes, disapprovingly, a pronouncement from Time ("A man for all seasons-especially the fifth season"), and dismisses the blubbery generalizations of Nadia R. Spiegelman in Jesters and Jeremiahs (Chanticleer Press...
...After all, she's not pregnant...
...wait at least till you run out of curry-you'll say hello to Mrs...
...But Van Horton's own style parodies that of the commonsensical hook review, out to briskly demolish his pretentious colleagues ("It is as impossible to validate as to vitiate his notion...
...Oh no sar...
...Yes sar...
...Can you use a pair of pajamas...
...And, doubling back on itself, it collapses entirely when Van Horton tries to combine his sober reasoning with Farber's lunatic hoo-hahing in a single sentence: "For it seems to me that no intellectual can overcome a certain feeling of homelessness in the province of the popular arts or suppress altogether that Farberesque voice eternally demanding, 'Who asked for you and who sent for you...
Vol. 58 • January 1975 • No. 2
