296
JOHN
SIMON
should be hip, he goes square; when he is putting the world on,
his
prose puts us off by going lyrical-analytical, and the joke-if it
is
a
joke-boomerangs. Of c.ourse, Gelber wants Manny to be inconsistent
("in the same breath he was a yokel and a hustler"), but he cannot
carry it off: the sheer fun in the character is seldom acute enough,
and
the seriousness-for some seriousness is intended-never fully material.
izes. Nor are the contradictions in the lesser characters made believable,
let alone resolved. Most of these characters, indeed, remain fixated some–
where between shadows and comic strips.
The basic technique of the novel is that of the cinema documentary:
a roving camera wanders from supposedly symptomatic, nay symbolic,
person
to
person along highways and subways, public and private places,
sometimes stopping for a scrap of conversation allegedly charged
with
the pathos and absurdity of it all, sometimes merely itemizing endlessly.
After all these dialectical catalogues and cataleptic dialogues, one can·
not escape the sensation one gets from bad documentaries-that
the
camera is not searching for illumination, merely for a topic.
To bind all this flotsam together, Gelber resorts
to
leitmotivs such
as
references to movies or dedicated dwelling on sexual or scatological de–
tails, however humble. Not only is every masturbation, urination, de–
fecation, windbreaking of the hero conscientiously recorded, but even
erections that never transcended "early stages," and aborted micturi·
tions ("he revised his opinion concerning his urge to piss"), are scrupu·
lously set down. People and situations are repeatedly 'apprehended in
terms of movies: one character is "a cross between Bogart and ' Von
Stroheim," another looks "like Elisha Cook, Jr."; Manny will give "a
fair rereading of Spencer Tracy playing Tom Edison" or wonder "what
would Humphrey Bogart have done?" When as manJ' as three such
references appear on one page, the device usurps both our time and
our
patience.
Gelber's style is occasionally deft. He is good at one-line descrip–
tions. A Village female neurotic is "the very picture of a mentally
dis–
turbed Israeli worker"; a shopkeeper asked to change a twenty-dollar
bill becomes "a parody .of a Jewish Philippine guerrilla fighter." Some–
times the comic successes have longer breath: "New York was turning
Nelson into a vicious parasite where he had been just an ordinary one
before." Manny muses: "Ten days ago there was nothing. Now a girl
in my very own home and a fink job
to
boot. Still nothing, but nothing
with added misery." But rarely does this humor extend beyond a para·
graph, and then only with lapses along the way.
Mostly, however, the style is nondescript while trying to be clever,
and sometimes it is downright uncouth: people "browse some shelves"
