688
PARTISAN REVIEW
imagination. It might be the part of prudence to point out that the
novel is translated from the Czech and that whatever flaws one may
find can be laid at the translator's door, but alas, such a happy delivery
does not await me in this case. Mr. Hostovsky's intentions are as pa–
tently admirable as his good will is real. In short, the trouble lies in the
artist's fundamental talent, discernible, I believe, in the case of a
genuine novelist, through the fog of the worst translation. And although
The Midnight Patient
shows evidence of careful planning and plotting,
it shows little else to its credit.
Briefly the story concerns a middle-aged psychiatrist, a Czech
emigre in New York, who, in the process of first involving himself in,
then extricating himself from, an elaborate melange of espionage and
counter-espionage, discovers that the single secret is still man and that
spiritual regeneration, love, alone can save men and their world. I am
sure we all agree with this notion and are happy that the hero, Dr.
Arnost Malik, has been able to work out his destiny and feel human and
forgiving at the last. The moral climate of our time, the stuff out of
which Mr. Hostovsky wishes to make the fabric of his novel, has indeed
many of the intemperate qualities that make the naked plot of the book
seem highly probable. Again, we agree that the world is in a sorry
state. But Mr. Hostovsky never shows it to us. He insists on telling us
about the matter
in
the guise of his protagonist. Malik is never for an
instant a real creature, like Kafka's unfortunate K, and the rest of the
folk involved with Malik in this hot New York midsummer madness are
less than wraiths; they talk at the reader and Malik talks back at them
in the author's voice. As the plot moves toward its climax, one thinks,
"Now at last he is coming to it. There
has
to be some revelation, some
discovery that will transmute the whole." It never comes. The rela–
tionship between Alfons and Malik, certain we think to become a com–
plex treatment of the "double," drops heavily into flat realism; the
affair with Helen disappears; the provoking sketch of Malik's first mar–
riage, instead of emerging as an increasingly potent motif, peters out
into a mere psychiatristic device for pointing the moral
if
not adorning
the tale.
And then there is the author's humor-at least I take it for an
attempt at humor since Mr. Greene, on the dust jacket, says so. Ar–
tistically-that is, functionally-such humor as seems to be there
is
tasteless, gauche, and so stubbornly obtruded that one feels quite sure
one has made a mistake. Though this ineptitude is serious enough, the
total failure to create atmosphere and character is the most damaging
of failures, and it would be unfair to detail it at length. Atmosphere
