Suburbs and Dumps
Trachtman, Paul
Suburbs and Dumps The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, by John Cheever. Harper & Row. 275 pp. |4.95. My Maker the Mad Molecule, by J. P. Donleavy. Atlantic-Little Brown. 178 pp. $4.75. Reviewed...
...Pastern and their bomb shelter...
...The image that emerges, in Cheever's suburbs and Donleavy's dumps, is an image of incipient madness...
...He is at his best when he begins to explore the instabilities that threaten a man's definition of himself...
...Pastern spends his time in the country club locker room or in front of his television set shouting "Bomb Cuba...
...Mrs...
...Throughout his stories, Cheever manages a neat balance between characterization and caricature, simple description and satire...
...Cheever's talent is to some extent limited by the narrow world he writes about...
...Ten Eyke did mental health...
...and Mrs...
...To have a sprawling mind...
...One of them, for example, takes "a superficially vulgar residence in a basement in Brooklyn," and sells beer, telling himself he had reached "the very bottom of the ladder, if it had any rungs at all...
...Bomb Berlin...
...Let's throw in a little nuclear hardware...
...Together, the two authors suggest that there is as much madness inside as outside of our corporate cells and corridors...
...Charity as she knew it was complex and reciprocal...
...To Cheever, it is the madness of a suburban housewife who sees her life as a television situation-comedy that can't be turned off...
...Mrs...
...He would seem to have little in common with John Cheever, who emigrated from prep school in South Brain-tree, Massachusetts, to settle in the suburbs of The New Yorker magazine...
...The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, the title story in Cheever's book, is a small comic masterpiece of suburban satire...
...Trenchard worked for the blind...
...Another one, holed up in London, remembers those days "when you are in the Bronx Zoo . . . and a man comes up to you and says barefaced right into your own sad face, say buddy, what a roue you'd be back at the asylum...
...Balcolm worked for the brain...
...To Donleavy, it is the insanity of a young man who, because all his sallies into the world at large end up in scrapes with the authorities, builds a wigwam in his rented flat and doesn't dare step out of it...
...But he is at least something of a prophet, out in the wilderness of Levittowns...
...Pastern is occupied in canvassing the neighborhood for infectious hepatitis...
...Donleavey has created a sort of folklore of American failures...
...But both writers, each with a new collection of short stories, are full of sad fantasies, comic conceits, distortions, and strange characters...
...For the most part, Donleavy (My Maker the Mad Molecule) is writing about those of us who prosper in the white collar markets of the age...
...It is the story of a Mr...
...The saddest thing about these two collections of stories is the inner emptiness of almost all the characters...
...Horowitz was in charge of diseases of the nose and throat...
...His manuscripts, I imagine, must come old and beer-stained out of some battered satchel...
...His characters undergo odd metamorphoses, or are afflicted with secret demons, or go to pieces as the settled landscape of their lives is changed...
...His people have copped out of the corporate life and are lost in limbos of their own making...
...If Cheever's people often find out that their identities are not quite as had been advertised, Donleavy's people are lost beforehand, unable to pick a self out of the great American supermarket of possibilities...
...Reviewed by Paul Trachtman J. P. Donleavy is a writer whose pilgrimage in life seems to have been from the streets of Brooklyn to the slums of Britain...
...Trempler was tuberculosis...
...So I think it is a strange thing to be an American," one says...
Vol. 29 • January 1965 • No. 1
