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MAUREEN
HOWARD
of his life sorted out in striking scenes. Most of his youth is spent in
hospitals observing death and being patched up for a life which is never
a sure thing. He grows up in Canada, in an immigrant Jewish family full
of characters larger than life. But then
Above Ground
is a blowup:
encounters with the fruit vendor are elaborations, family feuds are on a
grand scale. It's all in the telling, and Joshua is a gifted raconteur.
Indeed, the novel seems based on a Scheherazade principle - that by
spinning out stories, by endowing the world with his own heightened
sense of existence, Joshua is extending his own life. This puts a great
strain on Ludwig's performance and turns his novel into a concert pro–
gram. We want to be held, not merely entertained, by his range and
depth of .feeling. Much of the time he can sustain it. Nearly all the
characters in a great list of players, are magic evocations - the parents,
the uncles, the cousins, the neighborhood types live in a world that is
fully imagined with the richness of its own histories and consequences,
but when the novel depends on the purely random and sequential, even
the vitality of Joshua cannot endow it with more than a surface
excitement.
"Hey," [he says to his patient wife who's been shelved while he's
pursuing extracurricular affairs with co-eds advanc.ed even for
California] "How about chucking this town."
''Great! I've been waiting for you to say something like this." [There
is
a short exchange between them which lets us know that she's
been having a bad time of it, but the momentum is all.]
"O.K." he replied. "We'll go East and make a life."
"Terrific!"
Strangely enough, the hero's love affairs, which are supposed to
give him his sense of life, renewal and engagement, turn into dull myths.
One girl is tender, one tough-minded, another neurotic and rough.
Though Ludwig tries hard to give them dimension, they are flat. It's
not that the reader is reluctant to enter Joshua's fantasies, but that they
are out of proportion. Ludwig lets his man get sidetracked by the sirens.
The scenes of his mother's decline and death show the real strength of
Jack Ludwig's prose.
If
at times the material is weak, the performance
in
Above Ground
is grand; the design enriches a mode which might be
labeled American existential. The novel is immensely entertaining, never
frivolous. Joshua says in the end: "Man lives bounded by death: that
by itself sobers his parties."
From two remarkably honest writers, we turn to James Baldwin.
