582
PARTISAN REVIEW
sociological research projects being mainly a pretext for reading comic
strips (and then creating a successful one himself) and hot-rodding
with the leather-jacketed gang on the drag-strip. Here, I think,
the
novel is at its best: Hazen comes through vividly as not very different
in spirit from the wild kids he is "studying," and Elliott's point-that
the rise of positivism and the malignant spread of adolescent recklest–
ness are both expressions of the same spiritual vacuum in our society,
a vacuum which is itself most clearly exemplified by mass culture–
gets established without too much prompting from the wings.
Judging from a coy hint at the end, Elliott's answer is God. But
the hint is so coy and so timidly brought forward that we are left
with
some doubt as to whether and to what degree he really means it. Under
the assumption that he does, and assuming further that Elliott can
be
taken as a representative spokesman,
Parktilden Village
becomes an
extremely revealing document of the current feelings in the "Church
party" about the loss of values. Except for the last section of the
book,
where there is a sudden and unexpected shift in attitude toward Hazen,
Elliott's tone throughout is critical but hardly heated. He pokes fun
at Hazen and he attributes most of our troubles to the usual trio
of
science, industrialism, and the liberal ethic, but despite this, you get
no sense of a refusal to accept the reality of Hazen. Elliott is neither
horrified nor repelled: when he describes Hazen's simultaneous involve–
ment in affairs with the middle-aged wife of one of his former teachen
and her teen-age daughter, he writes of the incident not (as Graham
Greene, say, might) as a sinister matter with diabolic overtones, but
as the kind of occurrence that no longer seems so outrageous. It is only
when he comes to the end and spells out the pain Hazen's behavior
has
caused others that he feels impelled to express shock and to bring
in
an allusion to the need for prayer and faith in God. Even here, how–
ever, there is ambivalence, for the character who is the vehicle of
this
message is too silly and superficial a person to take seriously herself. In
other words,
Parktitden Village
would appear to indicate that sheer ha–
bituation to the nihilism of American life-for a nihilist, a believer
in
nothing, is precisely what Hazen is-has infected even the proponents
of a religious solution, who now find it hard to assert anything more
powerful against it than a mild irony, a fairly stale argument, and a
willed outrage.
Nihilism is given its full head in what from my point of view
is
the best of the three novels in this group,
J.
P. Donleavy's
The Ginger
Man.
S
The book is undramatic, badly paced, and very uneven indeed,
3. McDowell, Obolensky. $3.95.
