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MAUREEN HOWARD
throughout: the great sit-in contains all the hilarious horror of a major
political cartoon - a Hogarth or Gilray. One of the mal'.Y small wisdoms
of
Onwards!
is that Hentoff's man uses hip language with a fitting
embarrassment. Like a good eighteenth-century satirical pamphlet the
novel frankly has a message: our commitments, even if they fall short
of fashion, must be felt. Beware of
crpdo:
it is a counterfeit of personal
responsibility.
Retreating from the concerns of the day, Jack Dunphy has written
a comfortable and thoroughly old-fashioned novel,
Nightmo vers,
about a couple of lonely types, a childless Irish-American widow and a
beguiling boy, will-o'-the-wisp, \"ho appears to take her for all she's
worth, but instead leaves her with more than she ever thought she had.
I t's a happy formula, but
Nightmovers
is loose-jointed. People wander
in with their problems like the characters in a good TV serial. The
novel is admirably straightforward, nicely laid out but so bland, finally,
that the mind wonders off the page to discover what's missing: the
intensity and strangeness of Carson McCullers' misfits, the terrible events
of Flannery O'Connor's tales, the scope of a big Irish-American novel
by Edwin O'Connor. Sometimes Dunphy's observations are stunningly
correct - about Brooklyn in the old days, the familiar parish, the
charming priest, once powerful. fallen from grace in the eyes of the
world.
One of the difficulties in
Nightmo vers
is a confusion of sensibilities,
the common cold of quite good writing, which we have come to ignore.
Too often the Irish widow is overly articulate, subject to Dunphy's
sophistications which become her sophistries. Simone de Beauvoir should
know how to avoid this confusion. In
Les Belles Images,
she stands, a
staunch intellectual, at alms length from the fripperies of her heroine's
world. Mme. de Beauvoir has lectured us on so much in the past, but
she has instructed us in particular on the paltry trappings of the
bourgeoise, on the follies of the fashionable life, so we
must
know that
she has little use for the rich Parisiennes, a kind of
coterie de Caravelle,
that she picks up with in her new novel. Still, her pages are embroidered
with enough Spanish Provincial,
toile,
Chanel and Balenciaga to delight
the fiction editor of any ladies' magazine. There is constant disapproval,
to be sure - she can even take the fun out of Christmas shopping on
the Faubourg Saint-Honore with her feminine psychology - but
someone
has taken these empty people seriously, has described their tantrums and
their routine bitchery. Someone has, I'm afraid, entered the mind of
her heroine with suspicious ease.
Laurence, the young matron facing up to her crisis, keeps languidly
