380
A Shocking New Talent
Writes a Shocking New Book
PILGRIMS
IN THE
ZOO
A new kind of moral perception
and a painfully accurate pen tell
violent tales of America's moral
underworld. Bruce Brooks' van–
tage point is startling: his charac–
ters are murderers, homosexuals,
schizophrenics, and drug addicts;
yet he casts no judgment on them
or on their deeds. They simply
are
. . .
without the boundaries
of past and present, male and
female, innocence or guilt. No
pat intellectual pigeon holes, like
"moral" or "immoral" exist in the
reality Brooks reveals. Coldly,
honestly, he forces the reader to
ask himself:
Is
our so-called
moral world - with its neat,
philosophic categories - a com–
plete hoax?
Included In Brooks' volume
are six stories:
The Eye
0/
Nature, Journey
Through The Skin
(previously
published in
Accent), A Memoir
0/
Sardis Birchard, Some Ancient
Roaches, Love Among the Build–
ings,
and
Pilgrims in the Zoo.
5395
BEACON PRESS
25 Beacon St., Boston
8,
Mass.
CORRESPONDENCE
The clearest example (there are
others) is afforded by Mailer's
"Advertisements for Myself on the
Way Out," the prologue to his
novel in progress. Mr. Howe damns
it as "a series of windy speculations"
and asks Mailer to show us his
"exceptional gifts for social ob–
servation and narrative." A more
reasonable criticism might note that
speculations may be permitted in
something the author frankly labels
a prologue, and more importantly
that the prologue, though consisting
mostly of speculations (windy or
otherwise), also contains passages
portraying the hip world that
demonstrate precisely Mailer's "ex–
ceptional gifts for social observa–
tion and narrative."
Let me suggest that Mr. Howe
and like-minded critics reread, for
example, the passage in which
Mailer describes the encounter of a
square physicist with a Negro
call
girl. Aside from its specifically lit–
erary virtues-the economy, vivid·
ness and humor with which Mailer
establishes the characterizations--it
contains observation of a major
datum in the world ab()ut which
Mailer is writing: the
hipster'~
"putting on" of the square. Some–
times such putting on is the result
of direct assault, sometimes it takes
the subtle form of merely letting
the over-eager square put himself
on-as the hustler does to the
physicist in Mailer's story, or as the
good con man does to
the
mark.
The reason it occurs often and the
reason Mr. Howe might learn some–
thing if he paid attention to
it,
iJ
this: the hipster, deaf though he
may be to the very real virtuea
