Myths and Mazola
MERKIN, DAPHNE
Writers &Writing MYTHS AND MAZOLA BY DAPHNE MERKIN a c onsider the thin, crackly, wrapping paper skin of the onion, as I did this morning while cleaning out the refrigerator. It's like any...
...Well, why not,' she said, and reached for a tall bottle of safflower oil...
...Unfortunately, the intelligence is creakily rooted in those ageless, civilized truths we all wearily assent to, so Wilson's novel never attains enough tension to be defiant...
...He cries, Linda puts him to bed, and then she sits up in the dark sorting and mending what has come out in the wash...
...The narrator, Linda, is the sort of mad housewife we have been reading about in fiction by women for the past decade, a sufferer of low-key derangement who expresses herself in small domestic violations: leaving chickens to rot on refrigerator shelves, playing hide-and-seek with the neighbors...
...The boys pass their childhood at Tothill House, built in the 16th century by Thomas Tothill on the original site of Westminster Abbey...
...What makes Hayfield's book special is her mixture of intensity and humor in a way that brings to light hidden eccentricities: "You see, the big problem with staying home is the lush, sensual thickness of the job, which can be more dangerous to the alert than a dreamy lotus field stretching into the haze...
...Piers goes on to grander successes, culminating in the satisfaction of his youthful ambition to perform the opera Phaethon in Tothill House's Grand Hall, where his creative-ness was born...
...The bewildered guests are shepherded to safety—except for Tom, whom Marina shoots...
...it is impossible to credit siblings in their 20s and 30s who call each other "darling heart...
...His latest novel, Setting the World on Fire (Viking, 296 pp., $12.95) is about as old-fashioned—indeed, doddering—a literary gesture as you can get...
...JLjjgus Wilson is a British writer of repute who doesn't rattle any skeletons...
...The novel begins in the years immediately following World War II...
...Aunt Ruth disapproves of her niece's profligate use of paper towels and other conveniences, of Linda's presuming to have it easier than she had it: "You take the clothes right off the line and shake them out, hard, then you won't need no fabric softener...
...What are you crazy...
...after all, it is filled with snatches of intelligence, as English novels generally are...
...Open the windows if you want fresh air...
...There is Lady Mosson, Piers and Tom's widowed grandmother, an American heiress with cultivated British airs...
...Uncle Jim had shown him all the chess moves, but none of them was 'scuttling.' He hated floors and being a beetle...
...Tom observes how Rosemary kisses her darling sons and stumbles off drunkenly to catch the train back to her lover, "Uncle Jim," while the grandmother squelches the schoolmasters' efforts at polite conversation by feigning incomprehension...
...Piers, the rash and inspired elder brother, will grow up to be an innovative theater director...
...instead, Wilson proffers bits of pre-meditated types—one of this and a little of that...
...Should we...
...It is she who suggests an orgy, a sexual breakout from the prison of wifehood and motherhood...
...Crisco, Mazola—for the classy party of oil repute...
...Linda has moved with her husband and two children to a well-heeled suburb...
...Maggie, as abandoned as Linda is coiled, wears long peasant dresses and is indifferent to the neighborhood priority of Cleaning House...
...It will be interesting to see where she turns her comic gaze next, now that she has rattled the skeletons in the linen closet...
...Jack returns home from a business trip a day later and admits that he has been playing around with everyone and anyone, including Maggie...
...Things change when Maggie, a grown-up flower child, and her hunk of a husband, Chuck, move into the house down the block...
...Police burst in during the performance to arrest the maintenance crew and Marina, who have been using Tothill House's secret passageway leading to Parliament to plant explosives...
...The structure is the creation of two different architects, Sir Roger Pratt and Captain John Vanbrugh, and the brothers coin nicknames for each other—Pratt for Tom and Van for Piers—that reflect their style preferences...
...But, Tom, still the admiring younger brother, is on hand, as is all of high society, when chaos interrupts the "order and symmetry" Piers longs for...
...Moreover, the author's notions of the costs of Tom's sanity versus the risks of Piers' fancy flap around like an ill-fitting coat...
...Had he loosened up and abandoned his quest for a polished performance, had he perhaps taken the present fragmentariness of the world into account, Setting the World on Fire might at least have kindled our interest...
...the grandmother has recently suffered a stroke...
...He dies shortly thereafter in the hospital, leaving Piers to pursue his vision of excellence alone...
...The year is 1969 and London is on edge due to a recent outburst of terrorist activity...
...This poetic and accurate rendition of the wendings of a child's mind appears to promise a work of sparkling imagination...
...His attention to life is not keen enough to fill up the grandiose structure of myth that feebly animates the book...
...The whole family attends, including Hubert's hot-blooded finance, Marina Luzzi...
...The book itself is so stodgy that one is led to wonder whether Wilson intended the stod-giness to be taken ironically, as a flicker of defiance...
...In the stories he had read, beetles always 'scuttled.' He liked to act what he thought...
...Characterization, so deftly done here, loses its vigor after Part One...
...It seems merely out-of-step, lumbering instead of stately...
...Cleaning House is like a kitchen commercial gone beserk, with blood staining the the freshness and shine...
...Since Jack, the high-school sweetheart whom she married, is frequently out of town selling insurance, Linda spends much of her time spiffing up the house in preparation for critical neighborly visits that never materialize...
...The way the muscles move beneath his smooth skin...
...The eventual disaster is amply foreshadowed and wired to go off with mechanical, though not deeply literary, skill...
...Six-year-old Tom Mosson is cowering in the Great Hall of Tothill House, terrorized by the grandeur of the room: "Standing in the middle of the vast Hall, surrounded by the huge, smooth, yet twisting black marble pillars, he thought now I am a beetle, the tiniest of beetles, finding his way through the towering trees of the jungle...
...Regrettably, the expectation is not fulfilled...
...Finally, there is Great Grandfather Mosson, ruler of the roost, more shadow than substance, but a deferred-to figure who makes rare appearances under the watchful eye of a professional nurse...
...Buying a can of airl...
...The boys' father has been killed in the War and their mother, Rosemary, has an uneasy relationship with the haughty, xenophobic Mosson clan...
...Setting the World on Fire is startlingly unconvincing...
...But he did not know how to 'scuttle.' In any case, he was afraid to move on this endless sheet of black and white chec-quered marble floor lest he slide and fall...
...One presumes Wilson set out to write an old-fashioned novel of realism that joins form and content, but his goal eluded him...
...Uncle Hubert has died years earlier in pursuit of his masochistic sexual pleasures, a victim of the peculiarly British passion for erotic chastisement...
...The two women go shopping for the event at the A&P as though they were planning the most innocuous of dinner parties: "And then, suddenly we were at the oils...
...Wilson's opening is much the best part of his book...
...He'll only hear that word, way down the end of any sentence...
...The only fire is in its title...
...Tom, cautious and observant, will mature into an esteemed lawyer...
...There is her son, Sir Hubert, a middle-aged bachelor equally devoted to his mother and the Mosson heritage, whose sexual predilections will bring him to an ignominious end...
...Nancy Hay-field is an extremely talented writer, possessed of an unexpected angle on that most common of misfortunes, an aimless marriage...
...We might as well be healthy about it, although if we're really going to get down to it, honey is a hell of a lot tastier.'" The orgy proves to be a disappointing tangle of bodies for Linda, who in any case considers herself frigid...
...Already, at Piers' directorial debut in a school production of Shakespeare's Richard II, Tom can see the thinness of the social patina...
...and Rosemary is living abroad with her lover...
...So begins Cleaning House (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 156 pp., $10.95) a haunting and original first novel by Nancy Hayfield...
...Don't throw nothing out—don't be such a spendthrift—one of these days you'll be hungry...
...I saw it—'ow do you say?—rippling when 'e took off 'is shirt...
...It is hard to believe in anyone talking or thinking like the characters in this book...
...Orgy...
...Ultimately, Setting the World on Fire is about the precarious order of things and the discontents that threaten civilization . It is the ever-vigilant Tom who hears the ice cracking from the very start, while his more aggressive brother is too busy conquering to notice the disintegration...
...Who do you think you are, anyway...
...Once he ignores, or loses faith in his own unguided artistic instincts, the novel turns resolutely formulaic: Wilson leads us and perhaps himself firmly by the nose...
...It's like any explanation I can offer him—totally superfluous...
...Marina bewails how "boaring" everything is and exults over perfect adolescent bodies: "And this beautiful young man...
...Drawing upon the myth of Pha&hon—who borrowed the Sun God's golden chariot, drove it out of control and scorched the earth until Zeus destroyed him with a thunderbolt—Setting the World on Fire follows the lives of Piers and Tom Mosson...
...A JL...
...She also devotes her energies to warding off the demons in her head—especially Aunt Ruth, the penny-pinching, grimly forbearing relative who brought her up before dying manyyearsago "in an orgy of pain...
Vol. 63 • November 1980 • No. 21
