750
BEN JAMIN DEMOTT
And he painstakingly creates this figure's characteristic satisfactions
and gestures- among them a "swoon" at the passion of a whore
who, shown a gun, "stared at its hard beauty, gently stroked its
smooth barrel, and then, closing her eyes, kissed it, as the others
watched in silent amazement." But the explosion at the end of the
book shreds the programmatic adman as well as the hypocritical
socialite and other super-conscious cats, and the voice that recounts
the event does not quiver with positive regret.
To work the themes of the madman-poet-saint with poise and
without bogus intensity is an achievement-yet
The Double View
is
less than a thoroughly impressive book. The reason for this is not
obscure. Setting out to avoid the most familiar cliches-The Alli–
gator Belt of America, as it were-Brossard arrives only
in
a world
of less familiar cliches. And since he is a sophisticated man, he has
no choice except to toot an ironical horn at these stranger sights.
Contemptuous of the "soft" enlightenment as well as of the per–
petual identity-maundering of his central characters, he seeks
toward the end to elevate a trucker's helper turned hood-on the
ground that the latter is no "dillier with identities, no dallier with
self, a single dealer of infinite simplicity." But the tone of the effort
is that of a man who is simply bored with the old crowd. (Other
evidence of boredom is the nervousness of the writer's eye-nothing
here, try there; nothing there, try elsewhere.... ) As it turns out,
the matter of the grey, half-hipsterish, half-responsible world is as
lifeless, as impossible to transform into experience, as that of the
world which is to be "avoided altogether." It is true that Mailer,
who has pointed out the resemblance between his own preoccupa–
tions and Brossard's, finds stimulants to hatred and passion in the
world mentioned that may, when fully defined, dignify the place as
representative chaos. But this
in
no way alters the fact that Bros–
sard's findings rouse him only to contained mockery.
As
The N ew Yorker
explained,
The House of Five Talents
is
Louis Auchincloss's attempt to provide evidence for the claim made
about him for years, namely that he is a man who likes to write
about the very rich. His contention that this claim has rested on
flimsy ground is indisputable, for the focus of his work has more
often been on an accepted middle or even professional style (of
ambition, integrity, fidelity, infidelity, or the like) than upon the
