NEW FICTION

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32798, 24 December 1971, Page 8

NEW FICTION

City Life. By Donald Barthelme. Cape. 168 pp.

One of the difficulties that a selfconsciously avant-garde writer must face is that the scramble to keep in front does not allow enough time for sober reflection on the quality of the work being produced. This seems to be the trouble with Donald Barthelme’s latest collection of stories—there is no other plausible way of explaining the appalling discrepancies in quality even within a single story. Barthelme here reveals himself as a writer capable of unmistakable flashes of brilliance, but the pressure of the search for technical novelty appears to ba too great for him to devote ade~ste time to the proper presentation of a good climax, inversion, or whatever. Like many other young experimental writers, Barthelme allows some of his best work to be crippled by a literary deficiency disease—emotional deprivation. For example, the first story in this book, “Views of My Father weeping,” is to start with a most effective elegaic piece, with interesting antiphonal narration and a flat, uneasy mood. It establishes an atmosphere well, and with its foreboding tone seems to be building up to some kind of crisis when it is suddenly cut off with an “etc.” The reader feels cheated, and cannot help wondering whether Mr Barthelme simply found himself on the verge of doing something unfashionable—letting his readers have a healthy, honest, old-fashioned catharsis.

Down Among The Women. By Fay Weldon. Heinemann. 216 pp.

This is the story, written in a deceptively light style, of half a dozen women between the years 1950 and 1970 with flashbacks to an earlier generation represented by their mothers, and a new generation by their children. It has overtones of Mary McCarthy’s “The Group,” with the bright-eyed friends gradually becoming disillusioned as they pass into middleage, and death for one of them. The narrator watches the young girls as they have been having their brief dance in the sun before they go down into the darkness that surrounds their group. She has watched them “curl up and wither gently and without drama like cabbages succumbing to the passage of time”; moving through the days like sleep-walkers hoping that they will presently wake up; having babies or finding, that they cannot, that the babies too become people. Over-all, seeing success in terms of their alternating men with whom they either flower or wither in response, and having explained to them finally, with all the arrogance of' youth by their daughters, that they are trivial in their relationships to the male with the world in the state it is in.

The conclusion is that they are the last of the women; that woman will never, be satisfied again to be as hurt and Curbed in her ideals as that particular generation. Whether the forecast is correct and the girls of today do not, to some extent, also go “Down Among the Women,” time will tell, but the novel is a light sociological document and an entertaining tale.

Mrs Wallop. By Peter De Vries. Gollancz. 310 pp. When Mrs Wallop, a middle-aged landlady, hears a rumour that she has been portrayed in a novel by one of her former lodgers, she is naturally eager to find out more about it. However, the local library copy is much in demand, the retail price is too high for her pocket, and a furtive examination of the book (entitled “Don’t Look Now, Medusa”) in a shop reveals no-one that resembles her; so she lets her interest lapse until she overhears a group of students discussing the novel, which has by now become a minor classic with the radical young. Her interest renewed by their remarks about the character of the landlady, she procures a copy of the book (by now in paperback), and finds that she is none other than the Medusa of the title. Mrs

Wallop is a sensible woman, neither a prude nor an exhibitionist, and her behaviour subseqent to this discovery makes for a fascinating and amusing story—not because she herself does anything particularly spectacular or scandalous, but because of the fine contrasts the author draws between what other people expect her to do. This is a kind-hearted novel which succeeds very well within its own terms simply by the high quality of its character depiction: the author has not allowed himself the common sensation devices of sex and violence to any extent. It will appeal to a wide variety of readers, but especially to those who appreciate gentle, affectionate irony in the style of “Babbitt.”

National Winner. By Emyr Humphreys. Macdonald. 405 pp.

This is a novel which, perhaps unintentionally, is full of a sense of darkness and claustrophobia which is made to accompany the Welsh identities of the participants. The novel is long and is complicated bv the fact of having four heroes—a father and his three sons. The father does not appear until near the end, when we glimpse his early life as a poet (he wrote in Welsh, and was a National Winner). The novel begins with the son who is a don, hunting and failing to find his father’s grave. There is some rather irresolutely detailed observation of the academic life and of the leisured, privileged life of Peredur’s re-married mother. The second son, Bedwyr, is given domestic scenes—his wife washing her young children at home—the family taken by its unwilling father to the beach. The eldest brother, Gwydion, is a much-recognised television personality who is desperately looking for a new project. The three brothers do at one point come together and talk; but in general the observation is parallel, and the experience of reading the book will probably not be one of coherence. However, "National Winner” is the first of a series of novels about this family, and will have to be judged by its place in the complete pattern. It is a pity that so many mis-spellings anfl transposed lines remain to distract the reader.

The Dissemblers. By Joanna Barnes. Michael Joseph. 415 pp.

Once upon a time, Hollywood novels, like films made in the city, emphasised the glitter and glamour and romance of the high life. More recently, and no less factitiously, the emphasis has been on the sordid realities underlying the brilliant facade. Joanna Barnes has taken the convention of unmasking to an extreme beyond which no further development is conceivable. Herself a minor Hollywood actress, she presents the film community as inhabitants of a vast bordello, evidently hoping t to persuade her reader of her grasp of reality by distributing among her characters all the sexual perversions she can think of. A child star is molested by the most famous actor in the English-speaking world; a celebrated actress is raped and mauled by a dog: Nero’s Rome would seem to have been a colony of aesthetics by comparison with Miss Barnes’s Hollywood. Since she has found a publisher, it must be presumed that there is a market for what she writes, but the total effect is horribly depressing, and one finishes the book wishing that the author’s real gift for construction had been employed to less grossly sensational ends.

Honour To The Bride. Like the Pigeon that Guards its Grain Under the Clove Tree. By Jane Kramer. Collins. 211 pp.

The text of Jane Kramer’s “Honour To The Bride” first appeared in “The New Yorker.” It is a spectacularly simple story, written down baldly to amuse sophisticated readers. Much of the interest a reader may find in it will be caused by the fact that the story is not quite a novel—it is expansive reporting. The author exploits the manners and customs of a relatively uncivilised Arab community for the sake of her vast American audience. However, she manages her task rather well. She cannot help patronising, but she does show a genuine liking for her characters. The story which ishere told concerns “an Arab by the ' name of Omar ben Allel, his wife, Dawia, and their thirteen-year-old daughter, Khadija, who was lost on a pilgrimage in June, found in a brothel in July, and properly married off in August.” Khadia is her family’s only asset, and to lose her permanently would mean some degree of economic disaster. The author disarmingly says that most Moroccans would say the story was too mundane to bear retelling. She tells it well, and the reader must decide whether it was worth doing. The Ted Carp Tradition. By Rony Robinson. Hodder and Stoughton. 187. PPThe victim of this novel is a comprehensive school in Britain which starts off with ideals of a belief in equality and the making of that equality into a living thing in the education of future citizens. When the headmaster who established the school dies, the stresses in staff and student body alike, become very obvious and culminate in a stillborn revolution with an incidental, meaningless suicide. Along the way we are introduced to one confused teacher after another, ranging from the home craft mistress whose love affair is disrupted by her tendency to chatter when she should be concentrating on other things, to the middle-aged master who lusts after the budding bodies of fourth form girls. The students arecynical products of lower middle-class homes, realising the class distinction that still exists in the streaming process of the large institution. One shudders to think that this might be, a completely accurate portrayal of such schools. The tearing away of the veil from school children as completely innocent, fresh, little people, and teachers forged and broken in an inadequately thought out system, these are the ingredients of a not entirely successful, but interesting novel by a clearly disappointed ex-teacher.