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344
PARTISAN REVIEW
faculty wife, is forced to recognize that her husband has for a lcq
time now ceased to exist for her in any truly personal sense. Gordon
Graeme sees the emptiness of his parents' lives but realizes that
childish
assaults and rebellions will neither free
him
of them nor help him
to
make his own life a different one. And Howard Graeme ends the
book
by saying that
if
the dead are happy, he is happy;
if
the dead
aJe
satisfied, he is satisfied.
This novel suffers from the use of the stream of consciousness
technique. Whatever dramatic suspense there might be is vitiated
by
three alternative descriptions of the same events. (The student
who
starts the transformation of the family alchemy has no voice: she drops
in from the blue and disappears into the blue.) And while Mr. Macauley
does a good job of presenting the empty routine of the Graeme family
life as well as the stifling atmosphere, social and intellectual, of
the
small university town in which they live, this is not enough.
Daily
incidents, if they are to be vivid and vital (as they are in Joyce), must
be thrown like stones at the reader's senses. The reader must
taste,
touch, hear, see, and smell, and even find his involuntary muscles con·
tracting. This does not happen in
The Disguises of Love.
Mr. Macauley
has a great deal of talent. His perceptions are interesting and acute;
but he has not, in his first novel, discovered the fictional horizons
which will allow him to express all that he has to say.
Mr. Lanning's first novel is stylistically more complicated, as a
novel
is
apt to be when it is about the timid emotions of elderly
and
isolated persons, who suddenly discover that adolescence can begin
at
fifty. The Jamesian will not escape a slight case of prickly heat in read·
ing
This Happy Rural Seat.
The influence is too obvious-the
exCe$o
sively splintered emotion, the isolated and captivating adjective-and
Mr. Lanning's emotional grammar is hardly vulgar enough to bear it:
here is no Kate Croy conniving to steal a fortune; no sinister Osmond;
no possessive Mrs. Gereth.
Nonetheless, Mr. Lanning's pale accountant, Herbert Komar,
his
snobbish virgin, Blanche Loyd, and her ferocious and blind old mother,
Lily Loyd, have by the end of the book escaped the Jamesian compar·
ison and become characters in their own right. For Herbert Komar,
surveying an empty stretch of sixty years, does not, like the James
hero in
The Beast in the Jungle,
find that his life
is
at an end. On the
contrary, it is just beginning. By trying to buy the Loyds' ugly mansion,
he enters the American past. Met with contempt as the son of an
im·
migrant, he struggles to identify himself as a human being, and to es·
cape the anonymous conformism of his past. It is Herbert Komar who
