BOO KS
359
bourgeoisie, to define a standard, a tradition of the
avant-garde
for
what had already become the stuffiest of forms. That monstrous and
wonderful ragbag of old jokes and nightmares,
Finnegans Wak e,
repre–
sents the climax and end of that attempt. The
avant-garde
novel has
become a tradition; which is to say, it no longer exists. Out of Joyce
are derived academic imitations, or vulgarizations like
Raintree County
--or, at best, the kind of nostalgic vaudeville into which Beckett has
translated the example of the master in
Waiting for Codot .
For the rest,
the novel of the last twenty years remains largely sterile ; I do not
mean that there are no occasional triumphs, that some older writers
do not continue to write effectively, or even that the recapitulations of
some younger ones are without merit, merely that there has been no
general sense of a new breakthrough. Our novelists in general fight the
old fights : abandon or embrace naturalism, exploit or avoid stream of
consciousness, feel real revolutionists when they deny themselves more
fashionable techniques to go back to less fashionable ones.
But what, meanwhile, is the collection of fiction before me after,
these latest leaves from the memory book? I have chosen out of the
season's crop of fic tion, four books, two British and two American. I
have decided not even to discuss any of the current first novels, for
The First Novel has become so rigid and conventional in form that it
seems an icon.
If
we do not worship before it, we can only be dismayed
by its bondage to the accidents of biography, its exploitation of the
tenderness the young feel toward themselves, its dissolution of form into
feeling. Apparently, such a public consumption of himself is demanded
as an initiation, the orthodox
rite de passage
of the beginning writer;
and even more apparently, the kind of young man who would consider,
say, "the Three Unities" an infringement of his constitutional rights,
finds in the required and unchanging pattern of the portrait-of-the-artist
novel an illusion of freedom. These are interesting sociological facts, but
they have little to do with literature.
No, if one is looking for even the hint of something new, he must
avoid the First Novel. But first novels are everywhere; even the fact
that a novelist is writing his seventh book does not guarantee him or
his reader immunity from this blight.
It
is precisely at such a point
in h is career that Nelson Algren has got around to writing his own
First Novel, reaching back to the deepest layer of his life, paddling in
the deepest sedimentary deposit of his sentimentality, which is rooted
in the Depression years he spent in New Orleans. He has the good grace,
however, to contrive a fictional character, a sort of back-country human
stud, to stand at the center of the experience his book exploits. At least
