196
PARTISAN RiEVIEW
FICTION CHRONICLE
THE STATE OF NATURE.
By Paul Goodman. Vanguard.
$2.50.
A RooM oN THE RouTE.
By Godfrey Blunden. Lippincott.
$3.00.
THE WAYWARD Bus.
By John Steinbeck. Viking.
$2.75.
UNDER THE VoLCANO.
By Malcolm Lowry. Reynal
&
Hitchcock.
$3.00.
DARK DoMINION.
By Marianne Hauser. Random House.
$2.50.
THIRTY STORIES.
By Kay Boyle. Simon and Schuster.
$3.50.
I
N SPITE of the fact that most serious fiction of our day reveals great
inner distress and maladjustment, there still runs through these tor–
mented pages what Symonds, in speaking of Boccaccio, called a "bour–
geois felicity," indicated by, as much as anything else, the lack of radical
skepticism and the general absence of the speculative temperament.
So great is the intellectual apathy that one hopes for something better
from a controversialist like Paul Goodman; if it is not always possible to
agree with his enthusiasms, at least one knows he has a few. Unfortu–
nately, his recent novel,
The State of Nature,
is the least rewarding of
all his work
I
am familiar with. The book contains every paradox: the
scenes are much too brief and sketchy and yet the writing, sentence
by sentence, is turgid; the style shifts from the feigned simplicity of satire
to the vague profundity of a sermon; its subjects are innumerable-war,
violence, the individual in a hostile society, family insecurity and the need
for love--but at no point does he touch upon these with creative success.
Goodman calls
The State of Nature
a political novel, but it has
none of the efforts and, consequently, none of the delights of fiction,
neither character nor drama.
It
is not an essay.• since it does not impose
upon itself the candor of a position or the logic of defense. However,
the miscellaneous character of the book does not disqualify it; instead
it is disqualified, in my opinion, simply by its dullness, the very last
thing a political and philosophical writer ought to be guilty of.
I
think
Goodman's failure to arouse one's emotions is somewhat connected with
his tendency to equate things of unequal value and thereby depreciate
both of them. To go the whole way with him one has to be able to
hate the mere
bigness
of a ship lying in the Hudson almost as much
as one hates war.
There is a kind of mind that can denounce singing commercials
and the tastelessness of household furnishings with as much vigor as
it denounces totalitarianism; in fact this is the giddy protest most loved
by certain "radical" American writers. These writers invariably pose as
the custodians of art, but they treat the creative function as a love
affair in which the artist, abiding by the rules of love, reciprocates the
world's ignorance of his genius by ignorance of the world.
I
do not say
