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more genial, less corrosive, than was
Parktilden Village.
Like
Elliott's first novel, a number of them involve the hybrid relation–
ships that develop and wither in the misty social atmosphere of
the Bay Area, but the stories have a brightness that fades out of
Parktilden Village
when the adventure of an easy-going sociologist
with a group of hot-rodders turns rather strangely into a bitter
examination of original sin. It may be that "original sin" and its
related attitudes toward life and society have about played them–
selves out in literature for a while; in any case, it is heartening to
find that Elliott's religious interest-which continues to go hand-in–
hand with his social one--is devoted less to the proposition that "the
most important fact about a man is his capacity to do evil," than
to finding
in
the relations between secularists and men of faith,
between the impulses of the flesh and those of the spirit, the
transcendent moments when a positive spiritual value is asserted.
Sex and spirit, skepticism and belief, decorum and license,
individuality and class: these tend to be Elliott's main preoccupa–
tions and themes, usually set off by sharp contrasts that slowly
converge toward a believable resolution. A cynical New York Jew
comes to a California monastery to push through a recording of
the monks' music and loses himself in their singing of fourteenth–
century hymns, adapted by a melancholy ex-jazz clarinetist whose
sin, as he candidly tells the shocked sensualist Goldfarb, was vo–
luptuousness. Another story brings together an atheistic scientist
who has lost his wife and a Catholic Brother who fears he has
lost his faith. "The Sons of Ruth" explores the manners and morals
of the children of a brave and vigorous reformer: one son is a
chess-playing idler and the other is a shiftless young motorcycle
addict, who brings one of the girls from his set home to dinner
before he arrogantly takes her up to his room. These subtle pat–
terns of comparison and contrast give Elliott's stories a high de–
gree of coherence without compromising their naturalness and
vitality.
There are three fantasies in the collection, which seem to
me less successful than Elliott's realistic fiction. The title story in–
volves the atavistic experiences of a Negro anthropologist who
lives for three periods with a primitive tribe
in
the Andes and who
reaches through the rites of the Dangs and the Passion story to
