The Freewheeling Sally Burke

...That this never seems obtrusive is a reflection of the author's skill, as is his more obviously daring feat of writing convincingly from a young woman's perspective...

...What path to follow instead is her dilemma...

...In the '60s he returns to union organizing and eventually represents large numbers of public and health care employees, mostly black and female, in New York City...

...What Ben does not know is that Sally hasn't come by her beliefs and disbeliefs lightly...

...The author does very effectively play Sally against a variety of characters, however...

...Whatever the case, Brian Morton runs counter to the current trend...

...The sentiments espoused in The Dylanist—the faith in working-class solidarity and social justice, the hope for a better world founded on collective action—were once part of the stock-in-trade of American fiction writers...

...Could the disaffected stance of her beloved Bob Dylan, with his "rough moaning," suffice...

...A committed young union organizer, Ben recognizes in her freewheeling self-absorption and her impervious faith in her instincts the same attitude that frustrates his efforts to make workers appreciate the concept of solidarity...

...He attempts to use the novel to make some of the values inherent in democratic radicalism or socialism seem relevant and appealing...

...not only her father but a few self-centered peers whose ambitions and accommodations make her uncertainties appear attractive...

...In one, an ex-SDSer turned corporate lawyer considers himself "the new Andrew Carnegie," thinks self-interest underlies every human motive, and dismisses altruists and martyrs as "whiners...

...Morton gives us several sharply drawn satirical portraits of egocentric yuppies as well...

...Nonetheless, The Dylanist has a lot to recommend it...

...Sally is the "Dylanist" (as in singer Bob Dylan) of the title...

...Hannah is given to "forever reminding her children that they had once resided in her womb," and in this there is a bit too much of what Saul Bellow once memorably derided as "potato love...

...His effort strikes me as only partially successful...

...Her Communism is a "sentimental relation,'' derived more from fond memories of May Day parades and enjoying Saturday night socials with fellow Young Pioneers than from a commitment to the class struggle...

...By the novel's end he has become a legendary labor presence, elected to the national board of his union, and is often invited to Washington...

...Her father, Francis Xavier Burke, also an organizer, is known to everyone in the labor movement simply as Burke...

...It is thoughtfully constructed, precise in its observations, amusing, and at times moving...

...The reader, being aware of this, at first will probably be more favorably disposed toward Sally than Ben...

...Some contend that the relative dearth of such ideas in contemporary works is a symptom of our impoverished public discourse, others see it as a loss of confidence in fiction's capacity to confront large social issues—and both may be right...

...Sally never quite comes into her own as a character, and that is partly the reason she cannot accurately be called a true heroine...

...The story closes with his funeral and the family in mourning...

...Later he proves himself ready to overlook all of her ideological heresies in return for her love...

...Although she admires and loves him, it is his example, his "code of service, of self-abnegation," that she finds herself rejecting...

...The meaning of Burke's life, even of his death, ultimately overshadows his daughter's floundering attempts at self-definition...

...An Irish, working-class intellectual, he is purged from his union in the 1950s along with other Communists and suspected Communists, takes a job as aplater at a Ford factory in Mahwah, New Jersey, and starts his family...

...But The Dylanist is not merely a "coming of age" story...

...He meets her at a party and immediately sizes her up: "You don't believe in causes...

...at least that is what she is called by Ben McMahon, the second of two men to attract her when she reaches young adulthood...

...in a sense it is as much the story of Sally's parents...

...Not so her mother, Hannah Burke, nee Salmon...

...Her childhood and adolescence in the suburbs of New Jersey, a year that she spent at Sarah Lawrence College, and her early relationships with men are described in patient detail by Brian Morton, who plumbs his subject's inner thoughts with remarkable assurance...

...Sally's parents are unrepentant former Communists who, though their membership cards may have lapsed, remain devoted to the party's ideals...

...Morton is too friendly with her, too much her confidant, to give her the fullness the role requires...

...Her mother, by contrast, envelops Sally in love and emotional demands...

...For all his distance, Sally feels the weight of her father most profoundly...

...Sally has long recognized that for her father Communism means "something hard...

...Burke is portrayed as an austere man, emotionally aloof from his daughter: "He followed the events of Sally's life with a mild but distant interest, in the same way that, as a citizen of the world, he might follow political developments in Norway...

...And Morton's narration includes an ironic, unfailingly intelligent running commentary that places his protagonist's personal struggle in larger cultural and political contexts...

...Her aversion to causes is in fact a reaction against her parents' utter devotion to them...

...You only believe in feelings...

...The remark is made in jest, yet with a serious and slightly bitter undertone...

...Reviewed by Oliver Conant Contributor, "Dissent," New York "Times Book Review," "American Book Review" The central character (she never quite becomes the heroine) of this engaging first novel is Sally Burke, a quickwitted, moody, restless young woman in search of a meaningful purpose for her life...