120
JOHN THOMPSON
Natasha becomes pregnant. Tim panics at the thought of
be–
coming a parent, a man. She has an abortion, and then she
kills
herself, for she was only a sweet girl who wanted a man and had
the sweet, sensitive girl's weakness for the self-conscious boy who is
indeed the most representative figure of his generation, because he
will never grow up, he will always belong to the year of his gradua–
tion from college. These two are as alone as Daphnis and Chloe,
and as innocent and as charming, too; why must their pastoral end
so badly? For the girl's death does not seem gratuitous, merely a
finish to a story and a justification for an attitude like Catherine's
death in that other pastoral,
A Farewell To Arms.
This Daphnis
and Chloe have come up against biology, not as their originals did
who weren't able to guess what their strange warm stirrings could
mean, but against the one fact that none of our free speech or free
writing about sex or even our freedom of action about sex can pre–
pare us for or teach us entirely to evade: even diaphragms can fail,
and what then? Nobody, least of all their parents, cares that Tim
and Natasha have their "good sex"; but nobody tells them or shows
them or forces them to consider what there is to do next.
Perhaps I have spoken of this pleasant, fresh, earnest novel as
though it were the soap-opera of an ignorant crisis. It is not that,
nor is it a big deep novel that carries us to some profundity beyond
moral and social questions; it is a story written honestly and shrewd–
ly with no pretensions to literary innovation. But it is persuasive, as
it seeks to be, and I, for one, believe that this is how things must
be.
John Updike's novel,
Rabbit, Run,
and Paul Goodman's
stories in
Our Visit to Niagara
also propose to us representative
news of the world we live in. You will know something of the plot
of
Rabbit, Run,
for it has been a favorite of the daily reviewers
this fall. The hero, Rabbit Angstrom, like Tim Lanahan, is a youth,
or former youth, who cannot grow up; and his sexuality, like Tim's,
brings disaster. This novel, though, is quite unlike Barbara Solo–
mon's. Its literary manner is very tricky and ambitious, the news it
brings us of how life is lived today may be bad news, as hers is, but
it is brought to us not with sympathy and charm but with poisonous
loathing; this "fifth largest city in Pennsylvania" keeps its ugly,
stupid people not in a drab New York but in hell
if
there ever was
one; and while I don't know what we
do
if
we are persuaded of
