SHOUT OF RAGE
Johnson, Lucy
Shout of Rage Going Away, by Clancy Sigal. Houghton Mifflin. 513 pp. 15.75. Reviewed by Lucy Johnson R ight off the bat any reviewer of Going Anmy has to grant that it is not the great...
...His America was lost, and going away was the only answer he could muster...
...On top of all this the narrator adds his impressions of episodes from American history that are significant to him personally—the trek of the Donner party, the doing-down of the American Indian, and especially legends from the beginnings of the labor movement—as well as his own experiences in the U.S...
...As he travels, he traces the rise and decline of the politics of the left and tries to discover what has happened to the radical tradition in which he was raised...
...But he does print the usual disclaimer of resemblance to persons living or dead, and his publisher does call it a novel...
...The things that are going to bother most people about Sigal's second novel are its sprawling laxness, its overexplicitness when it comes to a conclusion, its tough romanticism, its often careless writing (poor copy-editing doesn't help here), its gaspy italicizing, and its man-talk, man...
...Fair is fair...
...A car trip across the United States from Los Angeles via Walla Walla, Washington, Nebraska, Kansas City, Chicago, Detroit, and Boston to New York City gives a general shape to the book, but it is complicated in flashback by a crosshatching of other journeys, hitchhiking or driving, and stop-overs of either months or years at various places, north, south, east, and west, at various times in the past...
...We were going private...
...It's good to hear...
...Well, no, and this, I think, is its major flaw...
...A wonderful smile...
...Going Away never really cuts loose from its moorings in observable reality...
...As he moves around, asking prickly questions of friends and strangers, he finds, "All the people I talked to felt 'out of it' . . . believing that they could exercise no real influence over the important decisions in their lives...
...The accuracies of passion were concentrating locally...
...The same question raised itself at the beginning of Clancy Sigal's first novel, Weekend at Din-lock, but by the end of that immersion in the life of a Yorkshire mining town a reader knew he had experienced the real thing—a book which, however closely based on fact, transcended its data and in so doing became fiction of a high order...
...Reviewed by Lucy Johnson R ight off the bat any reviewer of Going Anmy has to grant that it is not the great American novel...
...He asks for a willing suspension of irritation...
...It is American enough, heaven knows, but is it a novel, even a documentary novel...
...The nameless young narrator is in much the same situation as the Indian and his lost tepee in the old story: he knows where he is, but he is looking for America...
...He gets what he asks for from me, perhaps just this time, because he gives a lot in exchange: such large scale descriptions as that of the fight lor control of the UAW in the Forties as it descended into the realm of vote-counting, small-time local politics, and such short sketches as that of the unreconstructed West Coast Communist just back from a visit to Red China ("Chou is a real sweet guy...
...More depressing still, his old partners in radicalism were either busy fitting themselves into the mainstream of conservatism or were following blindly the dictates of the Communist Party...
...Most of all, Going Away is a shout of rage and despair from a young man who gives a damn...
...Sigal disarms anyone who makes this objection by calling his book "A Report, A Memoir," and claiming nothing more for it...
...Army of Occupation in Germany...
...In either case, he no longer had any line of communication with them...
Vol. 26 • April 1962 • No. 4
