146
MAUREEN HOWARD
Wright Morris must be what we term a professional.
In Orbit
is his
fourteenth novel. Unlike Roth's loose-jointed work, Morris suffers from a
programmatic tightness.
Everything
works as though the novel had risen
full-blown from a critical article. Take Charlotte, for example, a sensual
faculty wife who dances all by herself to Kid Ory records - how zany
can a girl get? But like all of Morris' people she is hemmed in by
thematic allusions.
. . . something in the air makes her hair unruly. Alan says it is the
storm. He has an explanation for everything. Charlotte would rather
that her hair is unruly because it feels that way, as she does. Just
before breakfast, when she combed her bangs, the hair rose from
her forehead as if drawn by a magnet. She had called to Alan to
come and look. Just that walk across the rug gave him such a charge
that she got a shock when he touched her.
"Enough in the air to burn the lights," he said.
"Enough what?"
"Electricity. Someday somebody's going to learn how to use it."
"I'm using it now," she said, and held the comb to her bangs.
On the next page "Charlotte herself is alive in a way electricity is and
it makes her unruly." Later, Alan, who is a heavy user of Chapstick and
has yet to index his thesis, says of the cyclone which was bound to strike
right down the middle of the book with its heavy symbolism,
"'If
we
could harness all that power - '. . . . 'Harness! Harness!' she cries. 'You
and your harnessing!' "
In Orbit
is about the invasion of the irrational on our not-too-rational
world. Things may happen by chance, Morris suggests, but the world is
full of prurient types longing for the next disaster. Into a little college
town comes an unmotivated high-school dropout, bewildered but at
ease with his ability for violence. The tone is casual- a mugging, a
half-hearted rape, a few stab wounds. Like the storm, the boy ricochets
off people's lives. It is all predictable; that twister was certain to blow
up a lot of thoughty debris.
THE JOURNAL OF THE OTTO RANK ASSOCIATION
The Journal of the newly-founded Otto Rank Association will make
available hitherto unpublished material that illuminates Rank's psy–
chology and contributions to the history of myth, art and religion.
Inquiries should be addressed to the Otto Rank Association, 81 East State
Street, Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania 1890
I.
