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SALLIE GOLDSTEIN
Other than confusion, his problem is that he doesn't feel guilt
(unlike his wife, Nancy, who feels it all the time), nor is he over–
burdened with compassion for the foibles and nastinesses of his fellow
human beings. One result of these traits is a penchant for speaking
the truth (or, from Nancy's point of view, being "black-tongued." She
wants to convert him into a writer, a satirist, so that he can be nice
to people in the flesh, nasty only, if he has to be, on paper.) So he
says to a donnish professor a t Harvard, who asks Gillis's "truthful"
opinion of him, "Sir, you are a creep." Such
uncaritas
makes him ripe
for damnation, and the Devil, in Brooks Brothers clothes, appears to
him in a Brattle Street restaurant and la ter follows him to California.
The Devil is opposed by an elderly, compassionate Hassid who wishes
Gillis to see that the bastards and creeps can't help it.
Much of this is wonderfully funny and also something of a relief
from the self-absorbed intensity of other recent academic novels, or
Jewish-academic novels. Yet it puts its finger quite as keenly on the
unsteady moral pulse of the academy, and of America, as one could
wish. What is particularly excellent in the way the divided hero keeps
bumping against his divided culture, in a four-square dance of mutual
self-contradictions. "Socially," explains Galsky-Gillis, "my schizophrenia
comes from equal commitment to the culture's altruistic principles and
its predatory practices. The result? I don't want to play the game, but
I want to win."
Because the aim of the book is not just humorous transport but
persuasion (we are urged to change, to live a little, to sever our
allegiance with the side of ourselves which is inclined to waste our vital
energies), the author faces a particular problem with his hero: Gillis
must change too. So he is made to undergo a not-terribly-convincing
conversion which involves, primarily, the birth of guilt and a revulsion
against his own forms of emotional spend-thriftness (like chasing other
women because Nancy has been a bit stand-offish). The change seems
a little forced-perhaps only because one is too sympathetic with Gillis's
lusty rompings and his black-tongued iconoclasm seriously to wish them
away. But this problem- what to do with the sympathetic but un–
regenerate comic hero-must be a difficult one for any comic novelist
who has a moral aim. Perhaps it only can be handled in the traditional
manner of a sudden transformation.
The other weakness of the novel is a more-than-occasional straining
for humorous effects, when the author is trying a little too hard and
too self-consciously to be funny . But this is offset by the spontaneity
