BOOKS
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simply to raise the problem of how far an author can ride his own
wooden characters before he implicates himself in their convenient
tastelessness. In consequence of countless similar plunges, the novel re–
duces itself to a wad of puerile rant and bargain-basement ironies. As
a critique of our ball-playing culture, it is no more than a graceless
lunge, and although Mr. Purdy seems immensely pleased with his own
cleverness, he is, unfortunately, misinformed about both its extent and
quality.
Drive, He Said,
Jeremy Larner's prize-winning first novel, is con–
cerned quite literally with playing ball. Hector Bloom, the hero, is a
Jewish ,basketball star tired of the game. An undergraduate at an in–
tense, ingrown upstate university, he feels that he has "spent too long
a life shooting balls into baskets"; he yearns for a more difficult victory
over. the alien but winning "self he had been given."
The book is an edgy reaction to an academic and social milieu in
which ideas
~e
seized with a pas'sion almost entirely rhetorical, a pas–
sion more self-interested than intellectually serious; the deadly anti–
podes of this environment are the official world of real and college
presidents
vs.
the world of pothead anarchy and revolution. In this
scheme, the liberals must see themselves as middlemen: half-bureaucrats,
half-daring. Walled in by their duplicities and cant, Hector wants out;
understanda~ly,
he is dissatisfied with the alternatives.
Despite the author's talent and sense of humor, the novel is disap–
pointing; it is marred less by uneven virtuosity than by Mr. Lamer's
baffling evasion of his own good sense. The book is too eager to please.
Mr. Lamer cheats with his own intellectual honesty, attempting to engage
the reader's sympathies while he continues to indulge himself in what
he himself has characterized as "beautiful incoherent romantic an'archism."
The mock-apocalyptic mumblings of the actor Tony Valentine, "an
Orgasm man," are seen, surely not favorably, as "fuzzy intimations of
how the orgasm might be just one feature of a hitherto-unthoughtof
psychic politics that could swing our desperate world into a new wild mil–
lennium of pleasure." Nonetheless, Hector, engaged in carnal commerce
with a faculty wife, is depicted coming "back to flesh with a mighty,
head-thrown roar of love, as his seed stampeding shot the gap to im–
mortality." Esthetically, Mr. Lamer violates his better judgment con–
stantly, and is not above stooping to the pap and twaddle diction of
"the Negro night come alive and burning pain joy
real,"
etc. Such writ–
ing results in the sacrifice of the book's inner life to mere typographical
frenzy; it is parasitic on a view that the author, intellectually, and on
the
whole imaginatively, disallows. As a result, it hardly comes as a
