TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

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<text> <title> (1985) Books </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1985 Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> January 6, 1986 BOOKS BEST OF '85 </hdr> <body> Mirror of Dazzling Chaos <qt> <l>THE GOOD APPRENTICE</l> <l>by Iris Murdoch</l> <l>Viking; 522 pages; $18.95</l> </qt> Author Iris Murdoch's devoted readers have learned, after 21 novels, to expect abstract, philosophic patterns beneath the beguiling surface of her fiction. The Good Apprentice, No. 22, seems designed to shake admirers out of such complacency. Murdoch includes most of her by now familiar clues to deeper meanings: constant references to God, lesser deities, the devil, good, evil, myths, legends, magic, and the power of elemental forces like water to nurture and destroy. But this time out, such allusions do not point toward an order underlying reality. They mirror instead a dazzling chaos of Murdoch's invention. A television soap opera could run for years on the bare facts of this novel's characters and plot. The major developments all affect Harry Cuno, a handsome, charming dilettante who lives in a Bloomsbury house and whose dead father was once a popular highbrow novelist. Harry has had two wives, both of whom died young. For the past two years he has conducted a secret, passionate affair with his second wife's younger sister Midge, who is married to a Scottish, half-Jewish psychiatrist named Thomas McCaskerville. Harry wants Midge to leave her husband, and her stalling makes him fretful: "I love her, she loves me, yet we're in hell." Two other problems discomfit him. Stuart, his son by his first wife, has suddenly dropped out of his university studies in mathematics, renounced sex, and proclaimed his intention to help others and to lead a good life. His cynical father comments, "He wants to be like Job, always in the wrong before God, only he's got to do it without God." More troubling still is the case of Edward Baltram, Harry's stepson by his second wife. This young man has sneaked drugs into a good friend's sandwich, hoping to initiate him without his consent into the wonders of hallucinogenic insights. What happens instead is that the friend and victim, temporarily left alone by Edward, walks out of a window and falls to his death. Once the authorities and newspapers finishing raking over the details of this tragic accident, "Edward passed out of the public eye into his private hell." The central question posed by The Good Apprentice is whether Edward can be saved from his paralyzing depression. Harry gives him a pep talk: "You are having a nervous breakdown, you are ill, it is an illness, like pneumonia or scarlet fever, you will receive help, you will be given treatment...you will recover." McCaskerville has reservations about his profession, calling psychoanalysis a "mishmash of scientific ideas and mythology and literature and isolated facts and sympathy and intuition and love and appetite for power." Nevertheless, he tries to help Edward: "I'm not telling you not to feel remorse and guilt, only to feel it truthfully. Truthful remorse leads to the fruitful death of the self, not to its survival as a successful liar." BEST OF '85 Fiction THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST, by Anne Tyler. The hero of the author's provocative tenth novel is a travel writer who would rather stay at home with his eccentric Baltimore family and his unruly dog. THE CIDER HOUSE RULES, by John Irving. The creator of Garp turns his talent for plot, pacing and character to a tale about a surprisingly engaging old abortionist and his orphan assistant. THE FINISHING SCHOOL, by Gail Godwin. The friendship between an uprooted teenage girl and an erstwhile actress is at the center of this polished novel of manners and morals and of a passage to maturity. MONEY: A SUICIDE NOTE, by Martin Amis. An intelligent and uproarious savaging of fast-land culture in Britain and across the pond in the U.S. by the gifted son of Comic Novelist Kingsley Amis. THE TREE OF LIFE, by Hugh Nissenson. Days and nights on the developing American frontier are poetically re-created in this imaginary 19th century diary by a friend of Johnny Appleseed's. Nonfiction COMMON GROUND: A TURBULENT DECADE IN THE LIVES OF THREE AMERICAN FAMILIES, by J. Anthony Lukas. The story of Boston's public school desegregation as seen through the eyes of three families: impoverished black, blue-collar Irish and Wasp. COPS: THEIR LIVES IN THEIR OWN WORDS, by Mark Baker. More than 100 police officers of both sexes tell of their gruesome, outrageous and often touching experiences. FINAL CUT, by Steven Bach. An insider's look at the making of Michael Cimino's financially--and critically--disastrous film epic Heaven's Gate, by the former production chief of United Artists. MOUNTBATTEN, by Philip Ziegler. A superb biography of Lord Louis Mountbatten, great-grandson of Queen Victoria, uncle of Prince Philip, last Viceroy of India, Admiral of the Fleet and "Supremo" to his staff. PICTURES FROM THE WATER TRADE, by John David Morley. A young Englishman submerges himself in the world of Japanese bars, baths and brothels and reveals some shady moments in the land of the rising sun. </body> </article> </text>