An Intruder Makes Good
FALKENBERG, BETTY
An Intruder Makes Good Loon Lake By E.L. Doctorow Random House. 258pp. $11.95. Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg To review this bestseller, even after the initial fanfare has subsided, is to risk...
...It thus creates a broad humanity, as when Joe observes: "I mourn all change even for the better and in the days of my return I measured what I had known as the injured intruder against what I saw now as the soleguest...
...Many have already argued that Doc-torow was leading up to Joe's coopta-tion all along...
...The reader expects Joe to be the eventual heir to Loon Lake not because he will mimic Bennett the business giant, but rather because he is the spiritual son of Bennett the crazy old man...
...Bennett, in the Adirondacks...
...How could I resist that...
...Prepared to despise the millionaire, he says, "I had expected not to like F.W...
...But just as he became acquainted with Hearn's Carnival Bestiary-The Wolf Woman, The Lizard Man, The Fingerlings, and the Fat Lady-he now gets to know all the passengers from Bennett's train: "gangsters, thieves, extortionists, murderers, " and their women, the marginal people the quixotic plutocrat has taken a fancy to...
...There was this manic energy of his, a mad light in his eye...
...wild dogs nearly rip him to pieces...
...The last page is a real disaster...
...After getting embroiled in complex union politics, he is finally arrested for a murder...
...Joe's subsequent life is reduced to a Who's Who entry that is unsatisfying on every level...
...Bennett's Mercedes-Benz...
...I mourned the absence of terror, the absence of hopeless desire, the absence of betrayals still to come...
...He was free...
...In addition, there are computer printouts that splutter along in bad verse or mini-biographical resumes-the least successful device, with a few witty exceptions...
...In fact, we become so addicted to his rhythms that it is almost a personal disappointment when he lets us down...
...They live briefly as man and wife in a Midwestern town, where Joe finds work in a Bennett-owned auto factory...
...Joe loves her unself-conscious beauty, her innocent childlike guile, and he whisks her off in Mrs...
...Loon Lake succeeds because on the whole it avoids Statements or cancels them out...
...But he was insane...
...Warren's free verse expeditions into history, metaphysics and description counterpoint Joe's voice, which gains in authority without losing its sensual intensity as the story unfolds...
...After vividly conjuring his settings and characters, he deserts us...
...Loon Lake is the story of Joe from Paterson, New Jersey, who leaves his carnival job to follow a train he has glimpsed in the night...
...Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg To review this bestseller, even after the initial fanfare has subsided, is to risk being distracted by the flutters it has provoked in the dovecotes to the Right and to the Left...
...Bennett...
...Joe's arrival is not auspicious...
...they used to torture the Wolf Woman...
...Warren weeps when he recites his poetrythe free verse punctuating the novel-and he also has a hilarious remembrance of his training at a Zen monastery in Kyoto...
...For the most part Loon Lake achieves a balance between risk-taking and control...
...We feel the same sense of letdown that Joe felt when, upon arriving at Loon Lake and entering the private railroad car that first drew him there, he finds it abandoned...
...and Warren Penfield, the mad, broken-down "poet in residence" housed, significantly, "over the stable...
...And once Joe does return to Loon Lake, the event is rendered all too briefly...
...As John Crowe Ransom might counter, one must look to the text...
...With no hint whatever of the dreary conformism exemplified by Joe's projected future in the preceding 257 pages, the tacked on ending is unconvincing as biography and a mockery of the book's picaresque spirit...
...Unfortunately, Clara is reclaimed by her gangster boss, so Joe, following a few more adventures, returns alone to the haven in the Adirondacks...
...Since it is first and foremost a work of fiction, though, I will leave aside all political considerations, including the question of whether or not it has an ideological intent...
...In a burst of reckless cunning, he challenges the police to phone Bennett and say it's his son, Joe...
...Intended as an ironic commentary on dehumanizing technology, the printouts are simply inert and irritating intrusions...
...and the text is mainly a rhythm, a sound in your ear of "loons diving into the cold black lake and diving back out again in a whorl of clinging water...
...This secures his release...
...The book owes its exhilarating pace to Doctorow's narrative method, an odd mix of shifting points of view and time sequences...
...Besides the guests, there is Bennett and his wife, a strong-minded aviatrix whose green and white seaplane lands in the water "with barely a splash...
...Doctorow's artistic gambles are gallant (a lot of "rules" are broken), but thanks to the richness of his imagination they nearly always work...
...For Clara Lukacs, a gangster's moll and a "restless cat of inattention" with "an expression on her small fair face of grief or petulance, I couldn't tell," the immensity of Loon Lake has become claustrophobic...
...Joe's escape with Clara, for example, forces the author to abandon his elegant metaphorical locale, and nothing in the ensuing pages quite compensates for the change of scene...
...The incongruities of present-day Japan, the hodge-podge of old and new, keep pulling the rug out from under the reader...
...The spur line leads him to the log-cabin Xanadu of industrial tycoon F.W...
...in Warren's mother wearing a summer straw hat in the rain, or in Warren himself becoming a mad poet, as if in defiance of his father's wish that he be a radical union leader...
...He finds Bennett "in an intensely derelict state of mourning" for his dead wife, while Warren Penfield is flying around the world in her plane...
...Although Joe loves the carney, he can describe the free-for-all rape of the Fat Lady with biting poignancy, or concede: "The Fingerlings were mean little bastards...
...Yet there is no internal evidence for such sly indoctrination...
...we laugh and laugh again...
...Doctorow salutes the incongruous gesture wherever he finds it...
...the author appears to have lost patience with his subject long before the reader's appetite had been sated...
...Bennett recognizes Joe as his heir, and we learn on the final page that "in the fullness of time" he becomes master of Loon Lake...
...Characters, scenes and experiences are set up as foils to one another, as fun-mirror images or reflections in a lake...
Vol. 64 • January 1981 • No. 1
