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JOHN
SIMON
dolent style, way below anything he has written previously, trivializes
everything from death and murder to love. He makes very little effort;
the words simply flow, and the images-and worse, the thoughts–
nearest to hand are accepted one after another. Rojack puts on his
shirt
after the murder "with the devotion of a cardinal fixing his hat." When
he thinks of punishment-and there is no guilt
in
this fantasy-he
writes, "Yes, I could go to prison, spend ten or twenty years, and if I were
good enough I could
try
to
write that huge work which had all but
atrophied over the years of booze and Deborah's games." (I cannot
imagine what Mailer had in mind here. The only image that came to me
was a sort of Nehru, under colonial rule, producing in prison the story
of his life---and that is singularly inappropriate to the novel's circum–
stances.) Graphic images are also nearly always trite or unexceptional.
"Her nose was a classic. It turned up with just that tough tilt of a
speedboat planing through the water."
Stephen Rojack lives by the cliches of pop-cruelty, but he has a
strangely old-fashioned "smell" about him. He does not appear to feel
anything, and yet he has none of the sleek, new affectlessness of the
young people in French movies. He is ineffably corny, native, mean,
messy, unattractive. He is only pretending, wretchedly
hoping
to be an
evil spirit. Mailer has not been able to transform Rojack or his murder.
They come to us without art and without inspiration-and yet they do
not represent even a minimal truth. What was meant to be a black pearl,
evilly shining, is just a pile of dust. And perhaps MaiIer's mistake
has
been to think that he should be, in
his
writing, a new Lucifer. The odd
thing is that his best gifts are often genial. Those gifts are serious ones,
always unexpected and original. That they are still his we know from
the extraordinarily vivacious piece about the
Republi~an
Convention,
written after
An American Dream.
Elizabeth Hardwick
WHERE LOVE HAS GONE
ON
ICE. By Jack G,elber. Macmillan.
$4.50.
BEHOLD GOLIATH. By Alfred Chester. Random House.
$4.95.
The latest news from Bohemia reaches us via two books:
Jack Gelber's novel,
On Ice,
and Alfred Chester's collection of stories,
Behold Goliath.
Mr. Gelber covers principally the normal beat; Mr.
Chester, the perverted. But, understandably, each is compelled
to
wander
into the other's territory.
