Two Witty Novels
Johnson, Lucy
Two Witty Novels The Final Beast, by Frederick Buechner. Atheneum. 276 pp. $4.50 Late Call, by Angus Wilson. The Viking Press. 316 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Lucy Johnson Tt is a rare thing in this...
...And no one gets paid: it's an old-fashioned labor of love and conviction...
...I have a reservation or two about the conclusion...
...DISSENT, a 100-page quarterly, was started in 1954 to provide a clear voice for democratic radicalism in the U.S.A...
...No institution supports us, none controls us...
...And its subject, a good woman, is old-fashioned too...
...It glitters with wonderful, wonderfully overheard dialogue, some moving men delivering furniture, a cocktail party, a disastrous dinner party in a Chinese restaurant, family meals, family rows, a public protest meeting, a visit between English and Americans on a train—all are accurate, funny, incisive...
...Instead, in his fifth novel, he takes for his heroine, Sylvia Calvert, a truly Invitation to a Bargain DISSENT is offering you a special introductory offer of 3 issues for $2, good until April 15th...
...Lewis Feuer on "Meeting the Soviet Philosophers" etc...
...He evokes echoes of ancient fools, court-jesters, and clowns, and suggests the old idea of a connection between the idiot, the madman, the poet, the clairvoyant, and the saint...
...If these two witty novels about good people can be compared, the thing that sticks in my mind is not any detail of either book, but rather a feeling about the books and their authors...
...With sophistication and wit Mr...
...Name...
...Reviewed by Lucy Johnson Tt is a rare thing in this day of serious horror fiction for a reviewer to come upon, in a single month, two novels about good people and both worth reading...
...Irving Howe on the U.S...
...Buechner explores the ambiguities of innocence, of guilt, of brutality and cruelty, of loneliness, of faith...
...Angus Wilson used to be an expert creator of characters you loved to hate —or at the least enjoyed feeling malicious about...
...And we had our own unfinished business: to reconsider critically the ideas of democratic socialism, without veering into dogmatics or blending into the establishment...
...Can Irma, the German refugee, really be the scapegoat for all of the rest, and is scapegoating or crucifixion or some form of symbolic sacrifice really the answer the novel has been leading up to...
...If that news is enough to make you want immediately to fill out the blank below, skip the rest of this ad...
...Our special introductory offer begins with the current WINTER/1965 issue, a 144-page number featuring "The Prospects for Pluralistic Communism," a 42-page essay by Richard Lowenthal...
...However that may be, both authors write extremely well...
...elections...
...Address...
...Technically expert as his writing has always been and growing in emotional understanding and feeling as he is, his work is still full of promises of even better to come...
...When she runs away, Nicolet follows her—whether as a way of escaping himself, or in order to run off with her, or to bring her back, he is not sure...
...Ben Seligman's study on "Automation and the Unions...
...Buechner has been since 1958), recently widowed, with two small daughters...
...He is a knowledgeable and entertaining writer, but he appears to have been where he is going...
...We dissented from the common assumption that the Cold War was a holy crusade,- or that America, having solved its social problems, was entering an era of "moderation...
...Surely its intimation of happily-ever-after is unbelievable, and even undesirable...
...Wilson seems to have passed his peak...
...Sylvia's family are not a prepossessing bunch and in one way or another they give her a hard time in her all-new environment...
...With Late Call he doesn't allow us these unworthy pleasures...
...I'm afraid not...
...DISSENT is edited by Irving Howe, and among the members of its editorial board are Michael Harrington, Meyer Schapiro, Norman Mailer, and Lewis Coser...
...It tells its story straight, with a begin-ing, a middle, and a happy ending...
...Sylvia's simplicity, dignity, selflessness, understanding, and humility are so touched with humanity and humor that we are completely with her...
...We are intransigent enemies of totalitarianism, whether "right" or "left"—we want free speech in Berkeley and Havana and oppose those who want it only in one place...
...Although Mr...
...Try DISSENT—a serious, controversial, thoughtful magazine...
...Late Call is an old-fashioned novel...
...One of his young parishioners, Rooney Vail, is in a state of near despair because she and her husband have no children...
...Harold, for instance, is really suffering dreadfully from his wife's death and is taking it out on his children in cruel ways...
...Its good man is Theodore Nicolet, a young Presbyterian minister (as Mr...
...Buechner seems still on his way...
...Frederick Buechner's first novel, A Long Day's Dying, was one of the rash of postwar works of fiction by very young men...
...mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmi S DISSENT, 509 Fifth Ave., New York, N. Y. 10017 J I accept your introductory offer of 3 issues for $2 J to begin with the Winter/1965 issue...
...Michael Walzer's first-hand report from Labor Britain...
...But Mr...
...payment is ¦ enclosed...
...i City................................State....................Zip Code I NO BILLING, PLEASE PR...
...As the plot is working up to its climax the seeds of a too-complete resolution of all conflict are beginning to sprout, and as a result the whole ending is wrong...
...Over the years we've published such major articles as Norman Mailer's "The White Negro," the great underground document from literary Russia called "On Socialist Realism," Paul Goodman's "Growing Up Absurd," a discussion on civil rights with Bayard Rustin etc...
...What results is a journey of discovery for both of them and for others who are concerned with them: Rooney's husband, Nicolet's father, the Jewish woman refugee from Nazi prison camps who takes care of Nicolet's children, and a hate-filled newspaper columnist...
...Her loneliness in the midst of her family, her feeling of uselessness and aimless-ness—what she thinks of as feeling fat —oppress us...
...Up to the end, however, The Final Beast is moving and delightful...
...The event that had finally turned him to the ministry was a college preacher's saying conventionally that Christ is "crowned amidst confession and tears" and then adding, startlingly, "crowned amidst great laughter...
...At twenty-three, his extraordinarily accomplished writing brought him high critical acclaim...
...It seems to me Buech-ner's best novel so far...
...Nicolet's religion is full of joy, laughter, joking, clowning, dancing, love—without at all ignoring the bestiality of the world or the disillusionment and disgust that anyone with the least sensitivity must feel much of the time...
...We also believe that a fundamental restructuring of society is needed, toward democratic planning, communal participation and humane values...
...Sylvia, just retired at sixty-four from a long career as a hotel manageress, and her rakish, self-centered husband, Arthur, move into an English suburban New Town with Harold, their son, the recently widowed headmaster of the local secondary modern school, and his grown children: Ray, a homosexual who works in the textile business...
...A group of intellectuals, labor people and students edits DISSENT...
...Current matters such as civil rights and medicare concern us...
...Is it typical of their generations, or only of the men themselves, that the writer in his fifties, who is dealing with growing old, ignores religion completely and the writer in his thirties writes a novel of religious mysticism...
...good woman, and surrounds her with characters who may be awful, but who are touchingly pathetic as well...
...Wilson makes it clear that things are not easy for any of them...
...The Final Beast is his fourth novel and, to me at least, there is more warmth and more feeling in it than in any of the earlier ones...
...If not, please read on...
...Mark, a rebel and peace marcher, and Judy, still in school but with her mind on rising socially...
...Her final discovery of purpose comes as a release...
...He has a church in a New England town where his congregation is largely aging ladies...
...All of this is done not in coolly intellectual terms but through particular people who are quirky and individual and anguished...
...Wilson does not make good more fascinating than, shall I say, less good, he makes it more attractive and appealing...
Vol. 29 • February 1965 • No. 3
