Captive Characters
DEEMER, CHARLES
Captive Characters Saville By David Storey Harper & Row. 506pp. $10.00. The Walnut Door By John Hersey Knopf. 224 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Charles Deemer Among certain captains of the...
...and finally, since here the medium is indeed the message, pages on which the spilling of marmalade or sun tan lotion is no disaster...
...characterizations that do not tax popular prejudices...
...This is Colin's problem and the novel's basic question...
...Reviewed by Charles Deemer Among certain captains of the literature industry, the greatest accolade that can be given a novel is calling it "a good read...
...Macaboy is a craftsman and locksmith, a one-man corporation called Safe-T Securit-E Syst-M...
...Like Eddie Macaboy, she is a refugee from the '60s, and it is our interest in the resolution of their love affair, which seems fated from the beginning, that keeps us reading on...
...There is also much fun here, much playful commentary on the high seriousness of last decade...
...Elaine Quinlan has moved to New Haven in search of a new life...
...it is to Hersey's credit that we believe it when Macaboy gets her...
...others have been Gone With the Wind, Peyton Place, Jaws...
...The Hersey book is perhaps the more accessible of the two...
...What do these books have in common, other than extraordinary sales...
...The ticket to escape the mines is education...
...Thus Elaine's apartment, we are told, is cluttered with "candles with scents of the casbah, classy underground sheets like the London Oz, roach clips with semi-precious stones, fiberglass statuary, banana incense sticks, vegetarian tooth paste...
...He feels trapped, despite his education: Not only do his teaching earnings go to help his family, but he comes to conclude that opportunity itself has been thrust upon him by his parents, to the compromise of his romantic notions of freedom...
...Surely last summer's example was The Thorn Birds...
...Elaine is lonely and-after her apartment has been broken into-fearful...
...For Macaboy installs it backward, keyhole to the inside, does not give her the key, and Elaine becomes a prisoner in her own apartment, subject to one of the strangest yet most intriguing courtships that can be found in contemporary literature...
...and so, with his family's blessings, the boy Colin passes qualifying examinations that admit him to high school, later to the university, and finally to a teaching career that is supposed to open life up to possibilities his parents never knew...
...Here are pages to put on the shelf of a permanent library, or to lend unsoiled to a friend...
...Colin Saville grows up in Saxton, his father a miner in the pit...
...both are nonetheless recommended...
...If the ending is less convincing to me than what came before, this is a minor flaw in an otherwise engaging and original book...
...Much of the joy here lies in Storey's artful exposition of growing up: the childhood games and rivalries, sports, the first romances, the early love affairs...
...Without exception, everything in this book rings true with such power and grace that Saville should be required reading for anyone who thinks the "old-fashioned" novel is dead or powerless...
...These are books to read at breakfast and the beach, and already publishing's advance men are looking for next summer's coup...
...The door of the title is made by Macaboy, complete with the best lock available, to secure her safety...
...For in the fall, the escapist reading of summer should give way to more substantial fare...
...Soon, though, it becomes a cell door to Elaine's captivity...
...While Colin's temperament is poetic, his poetry, for all its surface lyricism, has underneath a begrudging hatred for his roots...
...Macaboy is an attentive kidnapper, feeding his captive in grand '60s style, even sharing a joint with her...
...Saville, a naturalistic tale about growing up in an English mining village, is told more leisurely...
...I find it superior to The Walnut Door as well: Its people are ordinary, its plot without real originality, but the story is offered so precisely, so honestly, that we witness literary artistry at its best, the commonplace made universal, the inevitable made dramatic...
...I would suggest that they merely offer solid escapist entertainment, tightly plotted and seasoned with the proven spices of pop lit-adventure, romance, sex...
...Novels about coming of age will be around at least as long as good reads, and each genre has its season...
...Beginning with a blend of suspense and fate reminiscent of O'Hara's Appointment in Samara, it holds one's attention from the first...
...Ruth Mathewson has given us one answer in these pages ("Putting Down The Thorn Birds," NL, July 4...
...How to escape one's roots...
...He refuses the seduction Elaine finally offers as ransom, because he wants her on his own terms...
...That this is not necessarily the case is the fulcrum of drama here...
...The novels before us are engrossing, but neither is "a good read" in the book-biz sense...
Vol. 60 • November 1977 • No. 23
