The Great Questions
Schickel, Richard
The Great Questions by RICHARD SCHICKEL Afriend of mine, a novelist, once commiserated with me about my duties as a critic of modern American fiction. "These current novels aren't about anything,"...
...What follows is a contest between the two for the soul of Morgan's wife...
...The questions, however, abide...
...3), is as different, stylistically, from the other two as they are from each other...
...3.95) is, superficially, quite different from The Ginger Man...
...Its central figure, a girl who has been brutally raped, withdraws from her family and her customary life and seeks the womb-like security of a locked room, rejecting (and being rejected by) the world that passes outside her window...
...Whatever the brilliance of characterization and style, the cleverness of plot, the ambi-tiousness of theme (and these elements abound in our fiction...
...She, perhaps, represents everyman, torn between a need for a creed and the instinctive knowledge that the centers of all creeds are hollow...
...This all combines to give the book a surface brilliance...
...Eventually she attempts suicide, but is saved from it by a workman who takes her home and locks her in his room...
...327 pp...
...She finds, in his locked room, the peace she needs within herself, but with health regained, she finds she must free herself from her bondage...
...So he sits still for 24 hours on a bench in a railroad waiting room...
...Until meeting Horner she had allowed her husband to write his beliefs large on her essentially blank-slate mind...
...She dies on an abortionist's table, almost literally torn apart by the conflict between the two men...
...It is, in Georges Simen-on's term, a "pure" novel, a tale stripped to its barest essentials...
...He is utterly sure of his identity (which he has gained from his faith) and he is, of course, Horner's antithesis, for Horner, like many a modern intellectual, is a chameleon...
...It can be read simply as an entertaining story, but it is much more than that...
...My friend meant that pragmatism, which is both the glory and the bane of American thought and culture, has been the ruination of the American novel...
...She leaves her room only to work in a dime store where her self-imposed strangeness cuts her off from her fellow employees...
...It is perhaps idle to speculate on why our present novelists are so reluctant to generalize about the condition of man in our society, why they would so much rather concentrate on the trivia of life...
...She escapes, wanders the city in which she had once been assaulted, and is unharmed...
...He is worth meeting simply because his creator has plumbed the depths of this ever-fascinating type, giving us his schizophrenic fantasies, quoting his racy, rancid commentaries on the bourgeois world which he will not join and will not truckle to...
...She becomes pregnant but does not know whose child she bears...
...Forcing her to stay there, he tells her that she is his last chance...
...The last of this trio of novels, Mary Ann by Alex Karmel (Viking...
...His characters, particularly Horner and the wife, are excellently developed, and there is real tension in the conflict between them...
...Of course, the condition of man varies from era to era, the vision of it varies from writer to writer, and, in individual cases, from time to time...
...There he meets a man of faith, an historian named Joe Morgan, who is a militant rationalist, convinced that every problem has a rational solution...
...They are J. P. Don-leavy, John Barth, and Alex Karmel...
...Obviously, it is the latter...
...Then, of her own choice, she returns to the worker and marries him...
...Soon thereafter she sleeps with Horner, but without giving up her husband's faith...
...Donleavy's The Ginger Man (Mc-Dowell-Obolensky...
...126 pp...
...These current novels aren't about anything," he complained...
...One day he finds that he is psychologically incapable of moving, thus expressing one of modern man's hidden wishes— to remain immobile amidst the scurry-ings around him...
...I think their books are the most exciting we have thus far had in 1958...
...His identity shifts with his moods...
...I had to agree with his sound generalization...
...Where every page of The Ginger Man shouts the novel's novelty, Barth's work quietly masquerades as something fairly ordinary...
...All are young, and the first and last are first novelists...
...Cozzening shopkeepers, making love to almost anything in skirts, trying to survive (and hoping desperately for a windfall) without having to descend into the bottomless pit of steady work, Sebastian is a very busy fellow...
...The book is written in the first person, but Dangerfield lapses now and then into the third person with great effectiveness, and the stream of his consciousness is very near the surface, ready to break out at any moment...
...Is he a sick man—or is it perhaps the world which judges him which is suffering "the sickness unto death...
...All the choices open to Horner seem equally unappetizing...
...Horner is immobilized by lack of belief on which to base action...
...230 pp...
...Sebastian, however, barely has time to glance at a law book, so busy is he outwitting the law and the conventional moralists who surround and plague him in Ireland...
...equally obviously, Dangerfield is an artistically heightened version of all of us, plagued by a world bent on crushing the life out of us...
...the level of sheer competence has never been higher), you will probably find very little in the way of generalizations about the condition of man in the Twentieth Century...
...Bill student ironically studying law at Dublin's Trinity College...
...His creator, incidentally, has the gift of gab...
...This book, too, is heavily symbolic...
...Horner achieves a minimal ability to function and he becomes an instructor of grammar at a teacher's college...
...The End of the Road by John Barth (Doubleday...
...It is the story of Jake Horner, definitely kin to the Jack Horner who sat in a corner...
...This is a book which makes heavy retelling...
...3.95) is the most brilliant of the three, a picaresque tale of a rogue named Sebastian Dangerfield, an American G.I...
...You have only to make a random selection from among the recent crop to see what I mean...
...His style is a blend of Joyce and Sean O'Casey, with a few of D. H. Lawrence's choicer ways thrown in...
...There is nothing like a stack of fresh-minted novels, smiling up at me from my desk, to induce in me an almost irresistible lassitude...
...Along comes a doctor, never named, who enrolls Horner in his Remobili-zation Farm...
...Three recent novelists have, it seems to me, been doing the proper work of writers...
...Morgan is a man of action, one who acts on the basis of his beliefs...
...But it is not...
...Actually, The End of the Road represents another aspect of the problem faced by The Ginger Man, the difficulty of belief in our time...
...By that I mean the answers to the great questions of human existence always change...
...But with Horner she peeps in a window and sees Morgan with his defenses down, sees him as a rather pathetically weak man...
...But John Barth's style is mostly ironic, its manner often that of high comedy...
Vol. 22 • August 1958 • No. 8
