PARTISAN REVIEW
the clock to the early comedy; it is the story of another lascivious mother
and a warm daughter. But the story is false, repetitious, sentimental, and
even a bit disgusting; the jokes fall flat and the lust is forced. Caldwell
has lost touch with his people; the primitive has grown up into the
smoking-car story teller.
Unlike Faulkner, Caldwell never had a scheme or a myth to sustain
him, not even a useful framework. His best work was always anecdotal.
Perhaps he might have continued to be a readable writer if he had
been content with the fantastic, embraced it frankly and consciously,
and thereby evolved some form that could express the gift for exagger–
ated folk humor he has, or at least
had.
However, this is too much to
expect; it requires a greater belief in humor than Caldwell seems to
share. He tried to extend himself through ready-made Communist doc–
trines, but with such dull results that a good case might be made for
him as the American writer most misused by his own Stalinism. Still
one sympathizes with him. He became a writer during the worst possible.
period for his strange gifts, and his fame was always falsely attached
to the literature of moral and social significance. No doubt his admirers
are still those who could not bear to support his nymphomaniacs and
satyrs without an easy assurance that this wild entertainment is "seri–
ous." Caldwell shares their uncertainty about his talents. He has never
been a strong enough man to be faithful to his wanton angel.
But things are looking up. It would have been enough if Saul
Bellow's second book had been merely as good as his first,
Dangling
Man,
and how fine it is to discover that it,
The Victim,
is much better.
On the basis of these two novels it would be hard to think of any young
writer who has a better chance than Bellow to become the redeeming
novelist of his period.
The Victim
is less episodic than the earlier book;
it is more objective, not so cramped and uncertain; and fortunately there
has been no loss of intellectual animation, no retreat from difficulties.
The writing is unpretentious and very fine.
It is not easy to condense the imaginative situation that lies at the
center of the novel.
The Victim
is the story of Asa Leventhal, a white–
collar worker for the trade magazines, a somewhat dispirited man who
looks backward to the humiliations of the depression and forward to a
life that can only in the most limited sense be called successful. Leven–
thal has just barely managed to pull through; he has survived. And
then suddenly in the heat of a New York summer, with his wife out of
town and the illness of his brother's child necessitating trips to Staten
Island which produce dreary criticism at the office, Leventhal is con-
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