A Novelist's Lonely Song
CONANT, OLIVER
A Novelist's Lonely Song_ Pitch Dark By Renata Adler Knopf. 144 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by Oliver Conant In Renata Adler's second novel Kate Ennis, a successful, well-traveled, middle-aged...
...For years, he cannot spare even a week alone with her...
...Anyone who refers derisively to a "trendy French philosopher," or who ruminates on " sentimentality in the works of Gertrude Stein,"is not marching in that particular formation...
...Nor is Pitch Dark, which is not a great novel, free of them: Jake is a kind of villain, the book is filled with love and its diminishment, and Kate, despite her self-deprecation, is meant to seem, and regard herself (especially in comparison to others) as a good enough soul...
...When Jake finally does find the time for Kate, it is too late...
...A small sampling of her subjects includes her fellow journalists (their snobbery, egotism and occasional fraudulence...
...It is his type that is revealed...
...The behavior of the truck driver and then a policeman in the little Irish town alarm her...
...wealthy radical circles...
...Most of the other characters, with their improbable names—Viola Teagarden (based, apparently, on Lillian Hellman), or Lean-der Dworkin—and their foolish or vicious ideas, are no more than foils for Adler / Ennis' deflating and ironic commentary...
...No really great novel has been without these essential ingredients...
...But parts of the book give one the feeling that the wish to float free had compulsive force...
...The novel concludes with an impressive set of reflections on the law, the differences between the "stories" the courts tell or adjudge and the ones journalists like Kate relay...
...More serious, Adler is sometimes lazy...
...At her country house she spends a much cozier evening with conservative neighbors...
...Radicals have certainly been known to be sentimental, and to worship power and violence...
...There are moments when her hurt comes through, as when she uncharacteristically breaks off her ceaseless ratiocination to confess, "I find that I am crying as I write...
...What of Kate's perceptions themselves...
...Pitch Dark shows a mind far happier spinning forth fine threads of argument, exposition and analysis than dealing with the intensity of emotion...
...Others will admire Adler's evident talent, wit and intelligence, and hope for something more from her in the future...
...The expression "vaguely Leftish" is itself excessive rhetorical overkill...
...There are decent and humane Right-wingers...
...of ignorance, and being well-informed...
...True, the disquisitions on modern life have a determined, almost dutiful, outward bearing and significance...
...Yet allowing for all this, I could not help feeling that Adler's antipathy to even her "vaguely Leftish" characters is unfair...
...Pitch Dark, if not ridden with angst, has its share of that omnipresent modern feeling...
...She attends uncomfortable dinner parties and lunches with radical friends and acquaintances...
...In political terms, this complacency translates into predictably ungenerous portrayals of any of her characters who are even faintly Left-wing...
...Kate does not think of communicating with anyone at the time of the incident...
...It is both refreshing and salutary to find an American writer of stature willing to challenge facile Left pieties...
...On the other hand, the two conservatives who figure briefly in the novel, Frank and Marilyn (note the good plain American names), are described as "kind, educated, tolerant, church-going people...
...She appears anxious to distinguish her writing from the kind of tale where, as Kate remarks with fine scorn, "somebody loves and somebody doesn't, or loves less, or loves someone else, or someone is a good soul and someone is a villain...
...There are scenes of city life, glimpses of a world of guarded island villas, reports on the curious inhabitants of Kate's East Side townhouse in Manhattan...
...I'll get over it," she tells him, "and you'll find someone else...
...Yes, "sometimes," yet "sometimes he was just amused and touched by the degree to which she loved him...
...To such readers, the substitution of well-turned phrases and finely spun thoughts for emotional intensity or the presence of living, breathing human characters will in fact seem a considerable achievement...
...Adler is at her sharpest uncovering the irrational aspects of the way we now live: a friend's unthinking romanticization of the PLO, or the weird civility of a publisher's lunch with a convicted murderer...
...She loves him, she says in one of the novel's many refrains, "with the operatic intensity of a basset, or a diva, or a child...
...After her misadventures in Ireland, Kate returns to her work, ironically an article on the use and abuse of the U.S...
...There is in Adler a recognizably American wish to write as if the desires of others, the very fact of others, were not constraining on the self and its experience...
...passport...
...This is my little disquisition about...
...The opposite problem, a piling on of unnecessary details, is particularly noticeable in the anecdotes of city life...
...They have the bemused, deliberately incurious (albeit highly detailed) style of an "impression" in the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" column...
...She understands the trip to Ireland to be part of " all the little steps and maneuvers, stratagems, of trying to leave him now, without breaking my own heart, or maybe his...
...Very few of us, it seems fair to say, are morally at ease...
...Then, without batting a wet eyelash, it's on to Nabokov and Wittgenstein...
...Reviewed by Oliver Conant In Renata Adler's second novel Kate Ennis, a successful, well-traveled, middle-aged journalist, is in the process of breaking off a love affair of long standing with an equally successful married lawyer...
...the phrase "the incredible unseen beauty of the Irish countryside," for example, strikes me as a guidebook-style evasion...
...Adler refuses to begin her novel in any conventional manner...
...and knotty lines from Wittgenstein and Nabokov...
...The breakup is a foregone conclusion—no suspense there...
...Deficiencies in execution, however, heighten the sense of excessive self-consciousness: The voice often seems to be speaking, or muttering, only to itself...
...The escapade serves to distinguish Kate from the lawyerly, presumably law-abiding, Jake...
...Moreover, the discontinuous, journal-like form of Pitch Dark—reading at times like a private diary, at times like the attempt of a private diarist to reach for the public concerns of, say Gide's Journals —is largely suited to Adler's purposes...
...Also the sins of loquacity and glibness...
...Jake, the married lawyer, is so consumed by his profession and given over to his family that he has little time for Kate...
...the pervasiveness of crime...
...Of carelessness, and of exactitude...
...Still, Adler does seem to me to be unusually secure—even smug—precisely in her moral sense...
...At its heart, to borrow Kate's observation in a discourse on "the matter of solipsism and prayer," Pitch Dark is a "lonely song," and not simply because it is the plaint of a disappointed lover...
...Indeed, the Irish section of the book has a Kafkaesque nightmare logic, except Kafka nightmares depart from a real world...
...We have the sins of silence here," Adler writes with dismay...
...The intimate details—his playing Bartok and Telleman on the phonograph, for instance, while "what moved him was 'Wasting Away in Margarita-ville' "—strike the reader as true of his sort, a combination of high-brow front and low-brow taste...
...She has all the recognizable anxieties of the modern intellectual, and then some...
...From the beginning, she has very few illusions about Jake...
...Kate's flight across Ireland is an illustration: The reader can only believe in the symbolic resonances of the events, what they reveal about Kate's state of mind, not in the people she flees from or in her predicament...
...It's not what I know how to do," she has Kate tell us...
...These paragons oppose a local effort to reroute trucks that whiz dangerously by their neighborhood because "they so dislike the Sierra Club, Clamshell Alliance overtone...
...the "progress" of sexual mores at a Bryn Mawr-like college...
...Kate's account of the break-up, alternately angry, sad and bewildered, but moving toward acceptance and a kind of composure, is interspersed—at times abruptly interrupted—by reflections on modern life reminiscent of the author's celebrated first novel, Speedboat...
...They are represented as unthinkingly stylish, sentimental, or in love with violence...
...Kate Ennis is not herself notably at ease...
...Seeking to postpone the breakup, or perhaps to get her brooding mind off it, Kate vacations in Ireland...
...This dismissive attitude is problematic...
...she will typically begin...
...Her insight into her own motives is similarly acute, if highly intellectualized...
...She suspects them of trying to defraud or prosecute her in some way...
...Plot and characterization are barely bothered with in Pitch Dark...
...Of leading, following, opposing, taking no part in...
...Driving to the place, she grazes a truck with her rental car, a mere fender-bender...
...She is very good on what Denis Don-oghue recently described, with his customary shrewdness, as the inordinate reliance on the vocabulary of guilt and innocence in the moral imagination of most Americans, especially Americans who think of themselves as intellectuals...
...As for characterization, even Jake hardly emerges...
...There is a story here—consisting of Kate's perceptions—and an old-fashioned ambition to be its teller...
...A diplomat friend has lent her the use of his castle in a remote part of the country...
...As these exemplars suggest, though, the love has a quality of subordination and childish dependency...
...Does he love her...
...The absence of plot and characterization notwithstanding, Adler clearly does not want her work mistaken for an avant-garde effort...
...Instead, she decides to flee the country on the first available flight, in the process taking her place in the age of crime: She peels off the car's rental sticker and steals into the "pitch dark" of the Irish night, abandons the car when it runs out of gas, hitching a ride into Dublin, and gives an assumed name at the airport—all the while filled with a dread of capture and a fantasy that she has become a lawless fugitive...
...Later, it is Jake's considered opinion that they were conspiring to collect money from the London-based company insuring the rental car...
...Pitch Dark will please those for whom Adler's sensibility is not only attractive but a sufficient guarantee of satisfying fiction, who won't care that this novel is, like the solipsist's prayer Kate speaks of, essentially a "lonely song...
Vol. 67 • January 1984 • No. 2
