Crises in the Fourth Estate

...Is the act of division itself treason...

...In his craving for absolution for sins real or merely claimed, Chatworth (who bears a superficial resemblance to David Frost) first tries to get the ear of fellow passengers on a plane taking him to London, then settles for the microphone of his tape recorder, Father Sony...

...He recalls his childhood as a World War II expatriate from England to a third-rate Catholic boys school in America...

...To be sure, I was fearlessly anti-Communist in the dregs of the McCarthy years, briefly dazzled by Camelot, shocked by Kennedy's assassination, took a firm line with Castro, but welcomed detente—what the hell do you expect...

...The book is a tour de jet...

...And like Sheed, he is a sharpshooter for weak spots in his characters...

...You think a network is a soapbox in Union Square...

...He is trying to make connections but finding that his relations with his nearest and presumably dearest are not much more tangible than those with the innumerable and somewhat impersonal personalities he has reported on over the years...

...he asks as the guilt pours out...

...The Catholic conducts his self-analysis as though he were in the confessional and the Jew does his confessing as though he were in analysis...

...thought Wursup...

...Chatworth is at his most engaging when pricking his own journalistic pretensions...

...Wursup's career has lost its zest...

...Neither Chatworth nor Frederick Wursup, the protagonist of Richard Stern's Natural Shocks (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 260 pp., $8.95), is an uplifting model for journalism students—though each is exactly the kind of successful specimen who is hauled into the classroom to inspire the aspiring...

...Blick, as far as I can find out, you never married...

...A father, a head of missions and departments, supervising a hundred thousand men and women, an authority, he still felt and played a boy's role...

...He treasured astonishment, and treasured folly, the bizarre, gags...

...Pendrid's conversion from English twerp to American twerp did not diminish the influence of his Catholic upbringing, and so he has the darndest time with sex: His efforts to become a sort of raunchy Penrod are to no avail...

...It was only insensitivity, rudeness...

...Natural Shocks is studded with virtuoso turns, fine quick descriptions—like this one of a public figure of sorts named Doyle: "Tall, puffy, soft, rosy, old carrot head already whitening, blue eyes bulging in strained corneal fuzz, Doyle looked like an ex-alcoholic employed annually as a street-corner Santa Claus...

...Chatworth is like the passenger in the next seat who begins a conversation in lively fashion at Kennedy but has turned wearyingly earnest long before the approach to Heathrow...

...and he did not ignore what rattled his heart...

...His self-possession, long a shield, has become a barrier...

...From that time on, he was a transatlantic commuter...

...A hunk of subject he could chip into a lively piece...

...Wursup, for instance, looks back on his "probing" interviews with piercing shame, remembering with special mortification the demands he made on a reclusive poet named Hamish Blick, whom he admired...

...If you're a father, a husband, a son, a lover, a friend, a worker, how divide yourself, your sympathy, time, energy, money...

...For all the breast-baring—about a bout of romantic love at Oxford, giving up the family estate and the expiring class from which he sprung, and his constant posing and posturing—one has a hard time caring after the first couple of chapters...

...I was on the side of people, wherever I found them: starving in Biafra, dying in Ulster—all the people one would normally be against...

...Wursup is a more serious type and Stern takes pains to give his career a solidity that Sheed does not attempt with Chatworth...

...Like so many of his relationships, he painfully realizes, this one also has turned into a journalistic exercise...

...His interchanges with confessors, by the way, are among the funniest scenes in the book—a breakthrough in fiction...

...Wursup's recollections all ring true—his encounters with the great and the colorful, the fast-talking deals with New York editors and agents, the concocting of assignments...

...In a passage reminiscent of the spirit if not the style of Evelyn Waugh, Pendrid explains why the Third World was his kind of place until the Africans began imitating him: "Little did I know that even then Chatworth factories were being planned in the jungles and fever swamps...

...Unfortunately, a lot of this goes a short way...

...At the War's end, though, young Pendrid returned to England as one of those professional Americans who could find nothing worth preserving in the old country...

...That, at any rate, is how matters work out in new books by two accomplished novelists, Wilfrid Sheed and Richard Stern...

...Endings are much on his mind...

...From the roof of his midtown apartment building, he keeps watch, through binoculars, on his wife's apartment and makes the shrewd surmises of a newspaperman about what she's up to...

...They are cruel for the sake of a phrase, kind for the sake of a smile, and achieve celebrity status for virtues they haver never earned...

...Assigned to do an article on death, he meets a young girl with cancer...

...How to Cook Spaghetti alia Vonghele, How to Make an Outhouse, How to Raise Begonias, How to Marry, Divorce, Tell Your Children About Santa, Bury Your Father, Face Up to the Death of the Beautiful and the Young...

...Another 'How To' piece...

...Journalists praised his roughness, his technique...

...Stern, a knowing writer, has a fast big-city style that crackles with energy...

...How much of life do you owe any one person...

...Sheed provides a pretty good summary of the inherent fakery of it all as Monty Chatworth, looking frostily back over a career that has won him a universal reputation for integrity, observes: "From inane dignity stuff, royal weddings and such, I had gone on to global responsibilities...

...Maybe that is a tribute to Stern's fidelity to his subject: He comes so close to the journalist's life that ultimately his novel is defeated...

...Nevertheless, the subcharacters and subplots—especially the infighting at a small magazine where Wursup's ex-wife works—become diversions and dissipate the book's impact...

...I'm afraid it's not my sort of thing...

...In mid-passage, as Chartworth gets more serious about the women in and out of his life, it becomes evident that neither he nor the novel is going very far...

...The other characters —foggy dad, drippy mum, hysteria-prone sis, assorted schoolboys and girlfriends—are lightly sketched and seem to change personality according to the narrator's whim...

...Thus we learn that he owes his high place in American television to his tony English style and his high place in British television to his blunt American mannerisms...

...his parents and children are drifting away...

...The joint was full of Irish lads who couldn't make head or tail of the new Hail Brittania twerp and his odd accent and use of language...

...In the end, it seems scattershot—not so different from a collection of the magazine pieces scattered through careers like Frederick Wursup's...

...It was just another verbal turn...

...Wursup's next question was the sort he usually hated asking, but the act of interviewing simplified, even brutalized, him...

...He knows Cicia briefly, sorrows for her, loves her, and yet has trouble bridging the professional distance between them...

...What did I do...

...The readers, as Chatworth himself warns at the outset, is in for the story of an insensitive youth, a lout in search of a role...

...When we meet him, he is in the throes of midlife malaise, at loose ends personally and professionally...

...Blick wanted to talk, had probably always wanted to talk, but to a friend...

...Acclaimed and overpaid for work they enjoy, they skid importantly over the surface of things and try to pretend to knowledge and honesty they know is beyond them...

...All you need is 165 pounds of bullshit and you can build one anywhere...

...That is to say, Transatlantic Blues has its pleasures, but the reader may find himself wishing he were on a Concorde or that Monty Chatworth had succumbed to his better impulses and, fairly early on, had stepped off the plane...

...Pendrid ("Monty") Chatworth, the self-absorbed central figure who talks his way through Sheed's Transatlantic Blues (Dutton, 312 pp., $8.95), is a star television interviewer who keeps winning awards for integrity but knows deep down that he is a wretched sort of fellow —bully, coward, fake, prig, clown...

...So many years he'd intruded meanly into other lives...

...Is there anyone in the world—man, woman, child, animal—to whom you're close or have ever been close...

...It is the sort of thing people want very much to know.' For the first time, Blick looked at Wursup...

...Wursup was not a friend...

...his marriage is broken...

...he insists on telling too much about problems that even his confessor finds tedious...

...The book rests wholly on Monty Chatworth, and it's too heavy a load...

...After a bit of this, Millicent coolly remarks, "I think you'd better put that away...

...The leopard eyes were reproachful...

...Here he is in a punt with Millicent (having just thrown up, he is resting his head in her lap): "I undo my trousers roughly with one hand, popping buttons wantonly, and paw the air around her with the other...

...As he grieves for Cicia, he thinks bitterly: "He'd toss off that article for Mike Schlip now...

...He is guilt-ridden about each of these things and, most of all, about sex...