Playing among the ruins
Nicholas Lezard
A NEST OF NINNIES by John Ashbery and James Schuyler Carcanet, £10.95 This is an extraordinary book. It was first published in America in 1969, but had been at least eight years in the making, and is only 190 pages long. It contains no explicit sex, violence, flashy authorial tricks, bad language or wanton cruelty towards either the characters or the read- er's intelligence. It is a collaboration be- tween two noted American poets, at least one of whom is regarded as either the finest writer of English or an utter charla- tan, views held in spite and because of the opacity of his verse. No wonder it has taken an English publisher 18 years to dare bring it out.
The Ninnies of the title are a group of middle-class East-Coast suburbanites — a mere 50 miles from Manhattan counts as suburbia — who spend the book cooking each other meals, arguing restrainedly with each other, travelling around America and Europe (well, France and Italy), meeting each other in unlikely places, coping with regularly awful weather and skittish fuse- boxes, getting married and nurturing their ambitions. Not all have ambitions, but those who do have modest ones. One young pair wish to open an antique shop. Another, a restaurant. A talented 'cellist shordisted for the Hooker Prize.' forms a group ('Abel and the Antibodies') which eventually plays at the restaurant, and a music teacher has been waiting all his life to be asked whom he regards as the greatest violinist who ever lived. There are other Ninnies they meet on their travels: Claire Tosti, a soi-disant French sales- woman, her sister Nadia, given to such baroque manglings of the language as 'I will not fly all the way to Long Island that I may become immured with mad people.' Things happen, but there is no obvious plot, nothing that forces one to turn the page.
Apart, that is, from the quality of the writing, which pinpoints the foibles and aspirations of the. characters with delightful and delighted accuracy. This is a satire on middle-class mores, but a very benign one indeed. The collaboration is seamless, and there is not the slightest trace of self- indulgence anywhere in the book. The authors do not resort to stereotypes to get their laughs:
'My mother and father have come into town to have lunch with me and they want very much to meet you.'
`But I did meet them last year at the office party.'
'I know, but they've forgotten what you're like.'
This is the kind of joke which makes up A Nest of Ninnies: every page contains at least one such felicity; the cumulative effect is never tiresome.
The Ninnies have a wide and mostly useless frame of reference; generally, the wider it is, the more useless:
'Odd,' Irving said. 'I would have taken you for a professor. Or that woman who wrote that book about her parents who discovered radium.'
Fabia rested one hand lightly on Irving's shoulder.
'Eve Curie,' she remarked, 'is a brunette, not a blonde.'
Sometimes this makes the reader feel as if everyone is waiting for Trivial Pursuits to be invented; we learn, for instance, that Sophia Lbren's home town is Pozzuoli. Or: 'She treated him to a laugh like a Lalique wind chime which she had picked up at a revival of Le Postilion de Longjurneau.' Funnily enough, A Nest of Ninnies is never prissy, unless a complete lack of barbarity can be called prissiness. As an affectionate indictment of the bourgeoisie it makes Woody Allen look like Benny Hill, and that is as good a reason to buy it as any. It is, as W.H. Auden correctly pointed out, a pastoral, and will defy attempts to be seen as 'significant' in some way or another. An English architect, somewhat marooned in the Ninnies' sub- urbia, falteringly explains:' "Only a Euro- pean can appreciate what goes on here. . . where children play among the ruins of the language." '• It is fitting that Carcanet, that most intelligent and trusting of publishers, should have re-alerted us to this intelligent and trusting novel.
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