718
EOZIA WEISBERG
ness as well as for those who yield it. Old Gabriel who destroys his
four daughters through a refusal to acknowledge the attractive
power of the non-Jewish twentieth-century world, ends a broken
man, but Essie, the only one of his daughters who dares escape the
double tyranny of her father and Jewish orthodoxy, finds that her
triumph is marred, perhaps even empty.
The book does have a certain symptomatic interest. Miss
Charles writes with the sincere conviction that she is faithfully
recording the family life of English Jews: the family life as she
has closely observed it and known it intimately. She conveys the
clear sense of being in secure and total possession of her subject.
Yet the form she has chosen-the loose chronicle novel, with its
dragging pace, its slackness of tone, its excessive hospitality to
casual anecdotes and promiscuous representation-proves to be not
an easy and receptive medium but a screen between herself and
the subject. Miss Charles writes in the belief that she is responding
to what she knows and has seen all her life; but for the literate
reader it is impossible to turn to this kind of conventional fiction
without there intervening the memories of all sorts of other books
which have been a staple of middlebrow fiction for over a century
and the effect of which
is
largely to blur and weary.
Mr. Paul Herr is one of those chest-thumping, tough-talking
and unutterably fierce novelists who concentrates on political ad–
venture and assertions of virility. His book, which bristles with
conspicuous manliness, makes its ostensible claim as a picaresque
account of involvements in the great political crises of our time,
from the Bergen Belsen concentration camp to Castro's revolution.
Precisely why this sort of breathless recounting of yesterday's head·
lines is assumed to warrant a particular claim for virility is not
clear: perhaps because Hemingway insisted and James M. Cain
persisted. But if Mr. Herr's novel makes its claim
in
terms of public
crises, our sense of these crises is always gained through the coarse
screen of his hero's sensibility. In turn, however, the sensibility of
this hero can be apprehended only as a function of the events that
befall him: it is not there for any value or interest it might have
in its own right.
Just as Mr. -Hawkes _loves his experiments and Miss Charles
her family, so Mr. Herr loves finally nothing so much as himself,
