Mad Crusader
Malin, Irving
Mad Crusader When She Was Good, by Philip Roth. Random House. 306 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Irving Malin Philip Roth is usually concerned with the conflict between moral superiority and worldly...
...She despises her parents because she believes that they have not fought their imperfections...
...He chooses names carefully: his heroine cannot allow others to have freedom in "Liberty Center...
...She loves her ability to hate others...
...Lucy Nelson is a young woman who has never known the "goodness" of family life...
...WILLIAM McCANN edited the paperback, "Ambrose Bierce's America...
...But he is still concerned with the mad crusader...
...Their crusades are briefly triumphant before the oncoming darkness...
...She "loves" Roy because he does not know what he wants...
...In this new novel Roth changes the scene...
...Roth is wonderfully adept when he gives us discrepancies between the real and the ideal...
...Reviewed by Irving Malin Philip Roth is usually concerned with the conflict between moral superiority and worldly imperfection...
...The more she crusades, the more otherworldly she becomes...
...THE REVIEWERS LORD FRANCIS WILLIAMS, British newspaper editor and columnist for Punch, served as head of press censorship in World War II and later was a press adviser to Prime Minister Clement Attlee...
...But these symbolic names are less significant than the ironies reverberating throughout the text...
...Her father is weak-willed and alcoholic...
...She takes on the world...
...Her well-intentioned grandfather has a dream of life—"not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized"—and this dream, like Lucy's misguided mission, helps to destroy the family...
...She cannot rise above them THE PROGRESSIVE because she is as weak as they are— despite her enthusiastic faith...
...IRVING MALIN teaches at the City College of New York...
...She "loves" her emotionally crippled parents...
...instead of offering a bitter picture of assimilated Jews in suburbia, he depicts the normal Midwestern town of Liberty Center: the cheerleaders, the war veterans, and the cozy stores...
...PETER A. COLLIER teaches English at the University of California and is a staff writer for Ramparts...
...She decides that she will show them (and all the other "sinners") that she can change them and herself...
...she runs to "Passion Paradise" to be alone...
...We see her at last running from Liberty Center to some safe, dead heaven of her own...
...WILLIAM MATHES served more than three years as a naval air intelligence officer...
...Although Lucy claims that she cannot tolerate weakness, she courts it...
...Before her destructive marriage to Roy, she thinks that she "could do whatever in the world she wanted—even marry someone she secretly despised...
...His "Eli, the Fanatic" and "The Conversion of the Jews"—two of the best stories in Goodbye, Columbus—are ironic parables...
...her mother is shadowy...
...She is secretly obsessed by the will to power, but she calls it "moral superiority...
...He edited the recently published book, "Saul Bellow and the Critics...
...And when he uncovers the utter recklessness of Lucy's search for goodness, he is at his best...
...But Lucy does not understand that her parents, her drifting husband, and the others in the community are merely human...
...Her mission is doomed to failure...
...Because Lucy cannot separate the normal from the abnormal, finally she reaches the point of equating her petty desires with divine will...
...His first novel, "Minotaur, Minotaur," will be published this summer by Delacorte Press...
...It is when Roth settles for easy ironies—he is satirical about small town life and platitudinous wisdom—that he falters, but such faltering is rare...
...they give us "mad" (or childish) crusaders who attempt by means of self-sacrifice or religious submission to reform their neighbors...
Vol. 31 • July 1967 • No. 7
