FICTION CHRONICLE
~'I
It may be, indeed, that this was the theme of the narrative,
and that Mr. Gold's procedures, or the collapse of them, represent
the artistic imitation of what was happening to Burr Fuller; but I
don't quite believe it, or in it.
The first part, at college, among the fraternity brotherS and
the young man's two loves of comfort and despair, was pretty much
a waiting game between me and the novelist. I kapt grudgingly al–
lowing that though I didn't care for it he had to start somewhere,
and that my interest would properly be in what followed from all
this. The second part, as I said, I enjoyed very much in itself. The
third part seems a sprawling disaster, trailing off into the open un–
certainties of the future, as perhaps this sort of novel has to do, and
into a species of composition which suggested the author's prelimin–
ary
notes about his characters, which I don't think any sort of
novel has to do.
The manner of writing-this particularly applies to the last
major division, amounting in length to more than half the book–
belongs to that species of irony which may be called "the knowing" ;
there is no doubt that Burr Fuller, or Mr. Gold, or someone who
is
more than both and less than either,
knows
what life is in the
United States, and has taken the exact measure of its worth
if
any,
and knows especially how important it is to take a knowing tone
about it:
For a few parents it was a night out, their baby sitters safely
embedded in pop, potato chips, tangerines, and the U.S. Steel Hour;
the Young Marrieds would have the luxury of a real movie together
instead of a spliced 1940 epic with Clark Gable eighteen inches high,
not needing his belt (they saw
Band of Angels,
1956, Clark Gable
fourteen feet high, cinemascope, sash hiding the belt which tucked
in
the honorable summers of his age). The girls went by in their Basic
Black dresses, the men wore summer suits, and some, proudly, narrow
lapels and belted rumps. Burr reached back to touch his
Ivy
strap.
Trousers,
he thought. I am a proper young man and I shall wear the
back of my trousers belted.
This wise air of sophistication and culture sometimes, in the
course of preening itself, reveals the simple reverse of the poetics of
