NEW NOVELS
Off the point
Maurice CAPITANCHIK
The Ghost of Henry James David Plante (Macdonald 30s) Apple of the Eye Stanley Middleton (Hutch- inson 30s) Another Example of Indulgence John Elliott (Calder and Boyars 30s) Don Camillo Meets Hell's Angels Giovanni Guareschi (Gollancz 25s) Inactive, useless, dreaming, indulgent people . . .' The description, which has a bearing on three of this week's novels, occurs in David Plante's The Ghost of Henry James, and precisely suits his characters. Contemporary novels abound in the irrelev- ant disguised as the pertinent, but Mr Plante's enigmatic book, although slightly recherché and claustrophobic, is a deliberate evocation of inconsequence. Written in an elegant style which accommodates both squalid realism and menacing fantasy, gifted in its portrayal of atmosphere and place, it creates what might be called a poetry of pointlessness.
The story, told in fifty-seven short chap- ters, and intentionally disjointed, concerns the drifting, decadent lives of four brothers and a sister, of New England lineage. It opens with a deceptively petty and appar- ently meaningless incident, a visit of the five to the family burying-place in Mas- sachusetts. The graves they pass evoke most of American history, the family plot is their own past, in a sense, the American past; they are like ghosts haunting each other and the world. The episodes chart their wanderings in America and Europe—the men's casual, thwarting, mainly homosexual relationships, their sister Charlotte's attempt to forget herself in a boy-friend's aggressive energy. Their tragedy is that they are too comfortable in their agonised self-indulgence to break the family tie.
This novel, which will almost certainly antagonise some readers with its cloying ,o)., vision of futility, is open to more than one interpretation. Ultimately, it is perhaps meant to be a satire; -the 'ghost of Henry James' may be both a brother who dies and the great writer, and one suspects that these trivial, sometimes cruel, personalities are the heirs to what was once a genuine, if enervated, American longing for lost European roots, which has become the world-weary escapism of pampered people. If corruption can be said to have its poets, then Mr Plante must be counted as one of them.
The work of the Midlands author, Stanley Middleton, who has published ten novels, is usually distinguished by a total, detailed honesty about mediocre lives and a pro- found knowledge of the aspirations of the poor, but it is less true about the rich. The lack of sympathy he evidently feels for his hero in Apple of the Eye allows the char- acter's ordinariness, always a prominent trait in Mr Middleton's creations, to be- come depressing to read about, despite the vivid, rough-edged style. Edward Tenby, a successful, ageing archi- tect, has only marginal sexual relationships; women flutter around him, but he remains rather sloppily aloof. A young schoolmistress sleeps with him, then hates him for it. His ex-wife, now re-married, comes to him after fifteen years for a last, slightly degrading fling. He almost loses the services of his regular mistress, a middle-aged London journalist, and is sexually flattered to help her beautiful, neurotic daughter over a nervous breakdown. His one real virtue, a degree of self-knowledge, leads him to the realisation that he has 'a few years at the outside to scrabble on the edge of life with these, his tatty women.' This is hardly pro- found thinking; as he has long ago settled for a superficial existence, nothing that is not trivial can happen to him again, and his women are hard, rather cruel and un- appealing.
Mr Middleton knows all about the prob- lems of earning a living, and about getting, or failing to get, away from 'mum', but little about the life of leisure and pleasure, which he really should avoid. He has done, and almost certainly will do again, much better than this.
Writing about a writer (himself?) writing, John Elliott, in Another Example of In- dulgence, says: 'All that remains now is to fill this page like its hundreds of counter- parts. It has become like any other one. Its individuality is lost.' Lost, he is saying, because the page has been written upon. This curious idea, as though it is the very nullity of things which constitutes their uniqueness, produces a book in which people are merely figures in a (Scots) landscape. There is little story, and the amorphous- ness of the relationships makes them dif- ficult to describe, but, roughly, three city- dwellers, a young man called Arnie, his friend Wilmot, and his girl Lala, take a trip to the country. They are kidnapped by a wedding-party, an eccentric young aristo- crat wants Wilmot to live with him, and a former lay-preacher asks Lala to undress, which she does. Everyone is odd, withdrawn into the remnants of the past.
The isolated, almost -mythical quality of traditional Scottish life lends itself to this sort of contemporary interpretation, but it contains a trap which has not been avoided. Without detachment, the aimlessness becomes total, even writing becomes a mere obsessive waste, as the author indicates, and the re- sult is confusion for the reader. Mr Elliott has descriptive power, and his language is, in the main, clear. What he needs is a greater clarity of conception, and a greater belief in his craft.
Don Camillo Meets Hell's Angels is the last of the farces about the fighting Italian priest. It seems that in present-day, affluent Italy, only the aggressive young and a few clerics are really rebels, and inside the toughest adolescent a conformist is waiting to get out. This comic, violent and senti- mental book shows that crafty communist mayors and tough parish priests have much in common, and that in Italy the official God is on the side of delinquent girls who don't. Despite a truly frightful translation, much silliness, and banal solutions, Guares- chi's knowledge of his people and his public comes through, though perhaps only addicts will care.
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