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SALLIE GOLDSTEIN
it all very soon loses its point. Effects of contrast and vividness that might
have been achieved are flattened out by the punch-drunk atmosphere.
The campers wade through the book slashing, biting, gouging, kicking,
screaming for blood. And this brutality is performed against a back–
drop of imagery equaiIy brutal: figures of decay, refuse, vomit, corpses,
stenches, bowel-movements, plucked-up nails, pried-out teeth, and hack–
ed-off genitals form the dream language of the novel.
The author's intent is, without flinching, to give us the full benefit
of his savage indignation, to turn his gaze mercilessly on one aspect
after another of our society: religion, politics, art, sports, class-structure,
family life, business. He wishes to show that selfishness, corruption,
violence, and Philistinism have corroded every layer of our communal
life, until that life resembles nothing so much as the spawn of sewers, a
microscopic swarm thriving in muck and slime, decaying, dying, eating
and being eaten.
Enough of this vision is true to make one wish that it had been
realized with genuine literary power. But it hasn't been. First of all,
the noise is so loud, so unremitting, and so full of indiscriminate and
barely controlled invective that it destroys its own significance. More of
this sewage-tempest than he seems to realize has its source in Mr. Blech–
man's own soul rather than in the culture, and when distinctions like
that get blurred, ironic communication breaks down immediately. Second–
ly, Blechman uses only stock characters-"types"-presumably because
these make finer instruments of ridicule than more complex characters
would. All satire to some extent does involve exposure of the known,
the familiar, the typical forms of human folly. But the actors in this
novel are so grossly simplified, pigeon-holed, and two-dimensional that
type dwindles into stereotype, and exposure into cliche. Finally, every
aspect of the society that the author examines is morally equated with
every other aspect, all of them being cases in point illustrating the same
thesis (and in pretty much the same way): the country is rotten, equally
rotten in all of its manifestations. Blechman is in this sense Whitman's
negative counterpart, but the trouble with the approach is the same
whether all things are seen as equally good or equally bad: qualitative
distinctions between phenomena vanish and neither discrimination,
preference, nor any meaningful evaluation of anything remains possible.
The difficulty with
The War of Camp Omongo
is that its author is
an amateur of his own nature: secure in his lily-white image of himself,
he rages at the black universe around him, not seeing what festers
from the lily itself. As a result there is no real play of tensions between
self and society, or between various parts of self; no ambiguity because
