Moral Dilemmas
Curtin, Anne
Moral Dilemmas The Manor, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 442 pp. $6.95. The Pyramid, by William Golding. Harcourt, Brace & World. 184 pp. $4.50. A Hall of Mirrors, by Robert...
...The evangelical scalawag Farley is a fascinating remnant of generations of Bible purveyors, not only in the South...
...The Manor opens after the unsuccessful Polish uprising against Russia in 1863...
...This is the first book of a two-volume saga...
...The minor characters all have familiarity—including the right-wing magnate, who contains elements of several present day publicists on the American scene...
...The book describes three phases in the life of Oliver, a dispenser's son from Stillbourne, a town near Bar-chester...
...Reinhardt sells his soul to a far-right-wing radio station magnate and becomes successful temporarily...
...410 pp...
...The Pyramid is fun, and it too is consoling...
...Therefore the bone-picking critic feels compelled to explain the symbol and may be confused by the natural mystery of geometrical figures...
...In the resulting chaos only Reinhardt survives —and heads toward a bar and out of town to start over...
...5.95...
...Had the novel been called something like "The Life and Loves of Oliver," we could describe the book as an intriguing and delightful story of the progress of an English boy from his small town pubescent awakening to mature intellectual perceptions...
...Golding has with some wit given a flavor of parody to the Trol-lope setting...
...and there is a sort of beauty in the tortuous working of it all...
...Unlike Steinbeck—or Singer or Golding—Stone's people are not fundamentally good, but warped by misfortune, poverty, and ignorance...
...Reviewed by Anne Curtin Sometimes chance reading order throws an interesting light on books at hand...
...At the end of the volume, the Count returns...
...In the second part, Oliver returns on vacation from the university...
...There are assorted bar-stool philosophers and left-wing enthusiasts...
...some are just...
...They are not unaware of the time-honored rules...
...The novel is an intense panorama of New Orleans as perceived by these three major characters...
...Golding's The Pyramid is less complex and contained than, for example, his Free Fall or The Lord of the Flies...
...When Rainey realizes he has been a pawn and confronts the evildoers, he proves his own impotence and their power...
...Count Jampolski has been banished for his part in the uprising...
...In the case of these three books, two by well-known authors, the other a "first," three generations of moral dilemma are side by side...
...Reinhardt is a down-and-out disc jockey cum musician who takes up with Geraldine, out of West Virginia, by poverty and drunkenness...
...The novel is divided into three parts...
...But the book is called The Pyramid...
...The people are constantly interesting, but not so delightfully unique as in The Family Moskat...
...The Manor, as with Singer's work in general, is powerful, yet consoling because of the immutability of the forces at work...
...The Hall of Mirrors is not without the grand themes of the human condition, but for Stone's generation war, death, and taxes are no longer inevitable: the options are different...
...Unlike Singer, the way of all flesh from birth to death is not strictly according to the laws of God and man...
...The well-meaning Rainey goes to work for a welfare group—which is really run by the radio magnate and his political friends to reduce support of the poor...
...There is a climax of a grotesque right-wing rally which is turned into a racial melee by a few angered underprivileged...
...Stone's people are real in the way that the early John Steinbeck characters were: little people struggling against overwhelming odds...
...Their reactions to a changing Poland are the web of the story...
...Robert Stone is a moralist of the present generation, and he has no consolation to offer in A Hall of Mirrors...
...Without the second volume, we do not know what the total dramatic effect will be...
...A Hall of Mirrors, by Robert Stone...
...Isaac Singer's The Manor will be welcomed by his many admirers...
...nevertheless the laws exist...
...Three people are thrown together by chance...
...The book jacket makes the figure of a triangle inescapable and the instructions of Ptah-Hotep appear in the front: "If thou be among people make for thyself love, the beginning and end of the heart...
...The themes are grand: Singer has created his characters to' illustrate his themes in the broad drama at which he is so skillful...
...He is forced to participate in a Stillbourne Operatic Society production, a play within a play, illustrating the now silly-seeming attempt of Stillbourne to be something it isn't...
...They live in a rooming house with Morgan Rainey, the scion of a Southern family with a confused desire to make the world good...
...The final long section is largely remembrance in which the reality behind the sham is exposed...
...Golding is a staunch moralist ¦—a believer in rules—as most novelists used to be...
...And it is consoling to find that the rules are there, even if they are often broken...
...Jacoby has made himself an important entrepreneur, and his children have taken their various roads toward success or failure...
...The first part is one of simple sex told with insight...
...Houghton Mifflin...
...part two should appear shortly...
...But the characters of The Family Moskat were not deliberately drawn to prove a point—except the point of universal frailty in the face of the events of 1939...
...The pinnacle of the pyramid is adult perception...
...There are certain problems which may disturb the critical reader...
...It is the work of a master who knows what he is doing and takes time to do a good job...
...For Golding, some of the laws are unfair...
...It is Oliver's becoming aware of "life" and coming to grips with his small community...
...His estate is leased by the local grain merchant Caiman Jacoby, a devout Jew...
...It has a fine character portrait of the spinster piano mistress with all the sweetness and nastiness that such a character may contain—• the real significance of Stillbourne...
...they are incapable of living up to them...
...The Houghton Mifflin Fellowship Award novel for 1967 takes place in New Orleans as the city is recovering from a Mardi Gras...
...The first volume stands on its own, but it lacks the culmination which is surely planned in volume two, and careful readers of Singer will probably want to go back and read the two together...
Vol. 32 • February 1968 • No. 2
