TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/032591/0325470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.6 KB | 198 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 70

A Spring Bouquet of Fiction


Five veterans and a promising beginner offer the season's best
narratives

By PAUL GRAY


    SCUM by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 218
pages; $19.95). The title sounds right for a new Elmore Leonard
detective novel, but Singer has extracted it from a passage in
his own short story The Death of Methuselah: "Flesh and
corruption were the same from the very beginning, and always
will remain the scum of creation, the very opposite of God's
wisdom, mercy and splendor."

    From this rather glum moral, the 1978 Nobel laureate spins
a lively, hectic tale. Singer's language, as translated from
the Yiddish by Rosaline Dukalsky Schwartz, retains its
astonishing speed and vigor, an economy of storytelling
technique scarcely matched in this century. The year is 1906,
and Max Barabander, saddened by the death of his adolescent son
and the consequent coldness of his wife Rochelle, leaves Buenos
Aires, where he has made a good living selling "houses and
lots," to return to his native Poland "to perpetrate," he says,


    Sex has a lot to do with it; Max has been rendered impotent
by his troubles. In Warsaw, particularly on Krochmalna Street,
he quickly encounters a number of women as eager to use him as
he is them, with generally unhappy results. There is, as Singer
warns, little of God's wisdom and mercy in this book, but the
display of human perversity and sheer cussedness is
enthralling.


    THE MACGUFFIN by Stanley Elkin (Simon & Schuster; 283 pages;
$19.95).  Bobbo Druff, 58, is a washed-up pol serving time as
city commissioner of streets in a minor-league U.S. metropolis.
His wife of 36 years is going deaf; his son Mikey, 30, still
lives at home; and his health -- after a heart bypass, four
instances of a collapsed lung and extensive circulatory
problems in his legs -- is not robust. Understandably he
concludes that the "world is getting away from me, I think."

    So he invents a MacGuffin, the term Alfred Hitchcock used
to describe anything that gives spurious meaning to a plot, or,
as Bobbo explains, "whatever got slipped into Cary Grant's
pocket without his knowledge or that Jimmy Stewart picked up
by mistake when the girl switched briefcases on him." The
MacGuffin that Bobbo comes up with is a conspiracy to get rid
of him that involves everyone from his bosses to his son's
deceased Lebanese girlfriend to his limousine drivers.

    Within 48 hours or so, Elkin puts his hero through
permutations of paranoia. No matter how his language prattles,
jokes, howls, sings, the commissioner cannot quite divert
himself from the knowledge that "life goes on." Whatever his
other failings, Bobbo, like the best of Elkin's past
characters, triumphs in the end as a world-class monologist.


    FATHER MELANCHOLY'S DAUGHTER by Gail Godwin (Morrow; 404
pages; $21.95). Margaret Gower is six on the day (Sept. 13,
1972) she comes home from school to learn that her mother has
abandoned her and her father Walter, the rector of St.
Cuthbert's Episcopal Church in the small Virginia town of
Romulus. The mother has gone away with Madelyn Farley, a
college friend who spends a night with the Gowers on her way
back from a summer-theater job (she is a set designer) to her
home in New York City. The bereaved daughter and her father,
who periodically vanishes behind the "Black Curtain" of
depression, rehash this brief visit incessantly, looking for
clues to explain the calamity that has changed their lives.
Margaret remembers Madelyn's saying, "Lovely is the art of
pleasing others. Art is about pleasing yourself."

    Margaret's long, leisurely narration, which takes her up to
age 22, constitutes a test of this assertion. In the end she
chooses good manners, in the old-fashioned sense, over
assertiveness, generosity over self-absorption. Grace, both
divine and human, seems worth preserving. Those who encourage
Gail Godwin to include more nastiness, more hard-edged
portraits of evil in her novels, have missed the point that this
one, her eighth, makes again: it can be just as heroic, and
as aesthetically rewarding, to be nice as it is to be horrid.


    CHICAGO LOOP by Paul Theroux (Random House; 196 pages; $20).
With a lot more gore and a lot less talent, this novel could
have shared some of the uproar that has descended on Bret
Easton Ellis' American Psycho. Here is a wealthy, morally
rudderless white male stalking through a city, in this case
Chicago, looking for trouble. Parker Jagoda, a successful real
estate developer, has a child in the northern suburb of
Evanston and a sleek, sophisticated wife who works as a
professional model and periodically arranges to meet him in
hotels for ritualized bouts of fantasy sex. Still, Parker wants
more. He puts personal ads in local papers, and bears an odd
grudge against the women who respond. One night, during one of
these assignations, he does something so horrible that he
cannot bear to remember it.

    But headlines and TV bulletins about a "Wolfman" on the
prowl eventually force Parker to face what he has committed.
There is some macabre humor in this recognition; understanding
that he is in fact a carnivore, the former health-food addict
starts gorging on junk. But somewhere around this point,
Theroux begins a tour de force portrait of character
disintegration, meticulously detailed and utterly convincing.
A clearer sense of who Parker was before he fell apart might
have made Chicago Loop a clearer, more uplifting admonitory
tale; the scariest possibility is that the anti-hero was no one
at all until he found his fate, and his destination, through
violence.


    WAR FEVER by J.G. Ballard (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 182
pages; $18.95). Although he became known as a writer of science
fiction, that term has never adequately defined J.G. Ballard,
whose works include Empire of the Sun (1984), an
autobiographical novel (he was born in Shanghai in 1930, to
British parents) of childhood in a Japanese-occupied region of
China. This new collection of 14 stories reinforces the
impression that the author neither should nor can be
categorized.

    True, a number of these tales unwind in the future, although
science has little to do with most of them. The title story
portrays Beirut some 30 years hence, still the scene of
senseless, sectarian slaughter. A weary soldier conceives a
plan for peace that actually begins to work, until it is
sabotaged by the United Nations forces assigned to referee the
carnage. The reason why is the extremely incisive point of the
whole exercise. In The Largest Theme Park in the World, Ballard
looks ahead past the planned 1992 economic unification of
Europe to 1995, when many of the Continent's citizens decide to
extend their Mediterranean summer vacations year-round.

    What then? That is the disruptive inquiry hovering over all
these stories. Ronald Reagan back in the White House in 1992?
A man who claims to have been an astronaut, even though it is
clear he is lying? As he has been doing for some 30 years,
Ballard turns odd questions into inspired narratives.


    DAMAGE by Josephine Hart (Knopf; 198 pages; $18). Erotic
obsession is a risky subject for fiction. No matter how
besotted the victims of this malady may be, their behavior is
likely to strike mere witnesses, i.e., readers, as distasteful,
hilarious or both. This first novel, whose author is a London
theatrical producer and the wife of ad vertising mogul Maurice
Saatchi, sidesteps such unintended responses, thanks to
old-fashioned British reserve.

    The unnamed male narrator comes by his stiff upper lip
naturally. In his early 50s, he has been a successful
physician, and is now a Tory M.P. on the way up. He has a
beautiful wife, two talented children; he has, he confesses,
"never faced a serious moral dilemma." Then he meets Anna
Barton, his son Martyn's new girlfriend: "Just for a moment I
had met my sort, another of my species." So has she, evidently,
because before long the two are tearing at each other's clothes
on a floor in Anna's London house.

    "Of her body I have little to say," he notes; later, faced
with a ghastly consequence of his behavior, he responds, "I
will not speak of this." The understatement works wonders. This
disastrous affair comes trailing some of the cliches of
romantic fiction: kinky sex, a wineglass snapped between
clenched fingers. But Damage, through its fastidious language,
restores these tired old tropes to the realm of flesh and
blood.