A Novel Without a Voice
HIGGINS, R.A.
A Novel Without a Voice Home Free By Dan Wakefield Delacorte. 245 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by R.A. Higgins Dan Wakefield endeared himself to me forever when, in an obituary appreciation of Janis...
...But that brought them closer, too, knowing they all understood things they didn't have to say...
...Here the writing improves...
...In this book people do their thing in the kitchen, get into each other's heads as well as bodies, are turned on by History, really get it on...
...He leaves her, though, when a writer friend offers him a ride to Iowa City...
...Higgins Dan Wakefield endeared himself to me forever when, in an obituary appreciation of Janis Jop-lin published in a Boston newspaper, he compared the singer with Henry James...
...It is ironic, then, that the "I" is completely missing from his latest book...
...in Between the Lines he not only collected his articles, but added personal accounts of his thoughts and feelings as he was writing each piece...
...He stressed the importance of the reporter's subjectivity...
...In contrast, the protagonist of Home Free, a 23-year-old dropout on whom Wakefield has wasted his considerable skills as an observant journalist, is a human pinball who never comes alive...
...much of the hip lingo is quietly dropped, and Wakefield arranges the introduction of a number of older figures whom he understands far better than he does Gene...
...He has an affair with one of his professors at the University of Illinois (she's the one who's into History), moves in with her, drops out of school, and follows along to Boston when she gets an appointment at Northeastern University...
...Indeed, few books have been as accurate or amusing about the underlying realities of the '50s as Going All the Way...
...Thus the two high school football coaches Gene spends some time with in Maine are well drawn...
...About a third of the way through Gene leaves town to start drifting across the country...
...Gene bounces from experience to experience, always taking his lead from other people...
...Living in a menage a trois with a girl they have picked up, the coaches show us how some of the jocks from Going All the Way would have turned out had they gone through Vietnam...
...Wakefield held that James' tortuous sentences and Jop-lin's gut-wrenching screams came from a similar anguished understanding of American realities...
...Gene himself is picked up and kept by a fat, lecherous divorcee who is a local byword...
...Before taking up fiction, Wakefield was a superior journalist...
...Although Wakefield has lived in that city for years, the only impression we get of it, aside from a few tourist-like glimpses, is that it is a groovy place to live until your girlfriend kicks you out of the house...
...My complaint is not that the novel isn't autobiographical—only that Dan Wakefield's voice is nowhere to be heard...
...Those were done from the inside: Wakefield obviously knew his confused Korean War veteran and his recently divorced PR man thoroughly...
...We last see him in Venice, California, on his way to becoming a junkie—not too surprising, since he has been on the nod throughout the book...
...Wakefield has apparently accepted his subjects, the youth of the late '60s, at face value...
...Unfortunately, there are no such interesting juxtapositions in Home Free, Wakefield's new novel about the counterculture circa 1970...
...Gene gets into the promotional end of the rock music industry, until he has a bad acid trip...
...Wakefield is more lenient toward LA than are many other Easterners...
...The jargon is presented without irony?unlike the "moral rearmament" or the "meaningful relationships" looked at critically in Wakefield's previous novels, Going All the Way and Starting Over...
...Hanging around the drunken fringes of the Writer's Workshop there, Gene has an idyllic affair with a girl who wants to be a long-distance truck-driver, leaves her when her old boyfriend shows up, gets into TM, gets out of it because it doesn't do anything for him, and hitchhikes to Los Angeles...
...he even has a character who kicks people in the shins when they say the city is plastic...
...After some of the characters have gone to hear Joplin sing, all we are told is that they "just went home, not saying anything...
Vol. 60 • July 1977 • No. 14
