140
PARTISAN REVIEW
on the part of the reader, where they do not victimize the writer himself.
We expect of Mr. Kaplan's "International" novel, for instance,
a concern with sensibility at the expense of plot, a sophistication of in–
tent, and a certain air of adressing those already in the know. This we
do, indeed, discover-and the seed of the book's structure is appropriately
enough the form of the "Paris Letter" in a literary review. The novel's
cynical narrator, the long-term expatriate, Phineas Strauss, who writes
such letters for a living, obliquely tells us as much; and we are prepared
to believe that it is precisely in terms of such a chatty form that the
veteran expatriate might experience the European experience of his more
naive compatriots abroad. Indeed, the book's more unqualified successes
are all essentially epistolatory: either detachable anecdotes, like Tony's
comic interview with the Gide-ean Great Man, or detachable witty
essays on the Outsider as Ambassador, or the light of the Ile de
France, or our endemic vice of tinkering
(bricolage
to Phineas), all
seasoned with the special savor of the conversationalist who knows his
own charm and feels obliged to satisfy his own exacting standards of the
amusing.
Though there is no reason why a European letter to the
Partisan
Review
should be less tractable novelistically than, say, Pamela's epistles
to her mother, Mr. Kaplan does not quite bring it off. Certain basic
fictional strategies, and especially the novel's necessary bourgeois "thick–
ness" are lost in the resolve to sit back and dazzle us with good talk.
Quite deliberately, but in the end unfortunately, the persons of the fic–
tion remain "material," do not ever become characters.
There is not enough density of specification in the portrayal of
Tony and Pat, Mr. Kaplan's Innocents Abroad, who do not know they
are innocent, to sustain dramatically the main irony of the book, which
is that those who are Outsiders in America are in fact Plenipotentiaries
abroad, with Full Powers to represent-everything they believe they are
not. Despised at home, they are wanted in Europe, but at a price:
radicals, they stand for the Marshall plan; artists, they represent military
policy; emancipated, they stand for Puritanism; hard and disenchanted,
the naivete and beauty of youth.
These things they
must
stand for-for the sake of the Europeans,
who since the terror need desperately to exploit, to feed on the myth
they have been imposing on us for two hundred years. And what they
expect, we somehow
are,
in a sense we had not suspected, sociologists
or advanced artists or founders of Little Reviews though we may
be.
But the previous roles of Tony and Pat and Boggs as Outsiders, the very
meaning of Outsidedness is not sufficiently documented by Mr. Kaplan
