BOO KS
753
possible that if the author of
The House of Five Talents
had at–
tempted something of the sort with his narrator, he might have
maoe her into a force-a monument to virtue and cant, a fossilic
survival of interest for prominence of elbows and knees. That he
has made no attempt in this line signifies an absence of disturbance
at the descent from the ideal that can reasonably be regarded as
complacent. Auchincloss has found a figure on whom to center his
affection, and as a consequence his book is at moments touching,
but he has not really risen above the somnambulant middle con–
sumer. His book is, in sum, a disappointment. Its project of dis–
tinguishing the heroic past from the measly present (at the end, "in
the downy bed of more romantic concepts," the Newport titans are
transformed into Renaissance princes and queens) issues only in
withered stereotypes: The Vulgar Climber, The "Poor" But Taste–
ful Social Arbiter, The Commie Heir. And of them all the spiky
old maid of such promise turns out at last to
be
chief.
There are few if any stereotypes
in
J ulius Horwitz's
The In–
habitants
and almost no allusions to the common middle world. The
book is about people living on city welfare checks in Broadway and
104th Street "hotels"; its events, to sanitize them in a word, are re–
counted by an un-brutalized caseworker who seeks to organize the
chaos of his own responses by centering passion and hope on a
single casualty (a girl with a fatherless child). The failure of this
contention against meaningless.ness by action seems neither more
nor less inevitable than the failures elsewhere in the book to arrive
at a principle of order by thought. Roaches and filth, addiction and
senility, rape and prolicide, the eye of the rat and the eyes of
abandoned children left to make meals on liverwurst and marsh–
mallow cookies-where in all this would order
be
found? Not, as
the caseworker discovers, in the routine of official giving. The man
numbs himself for a moment with lists ("Anybody else could give
the girl talk. You'll be surprised by what I could give her. Let me
itemize: 8 milk bottles [Pyrex], 2 4-ounce bottles, 12 nipples, 10
nipple caps ..."), but the paralyzing questions return: "Why was
this girl born? How does she live? How will she die?" The myth
that somewhere in the million vomit-sour rooms lies a great soul
to be saved allays no perturbation-for no one will be saved. The
possibility that familiarity with ugliness will in the end diminish its
