146
JOSEPH PEQUIGNEY
SLOW DANCE ON THE KILLING GROUND
SHOOT IT. By Paul Tyner. Atlantic:-little, Brown. $5.75.
LISTEN RUBEN FONTANEZ. By Jay Neugeboren. Houghton Mifflin. $4.50.
THE ANSWER. By Jeremy Larner. Mac:millan. $4.95.
Paul Tyner, the most gifted of these three young novelists,
turns in, with
Shoot It,
an attractive first performance. His plot turns
on the killing of a Negro pursesnatcher by a white patrolman. Herbert
G. Rucker, twenty-three, a rather likeable mediocrity, hardly a villain,
has little insight into the springs of his impetuous act. He shows him–
self hazy and lackadaisical over the consequences that dog him, and
the consequence at the foreground is a lawsuit for three million dollars
brought by the widow, Hattie. Little attempt is made to win sympathy
for her or the other Negroes. She loses her case when it is undermined
by the key witness. Herby at the end gets a favorable court decision
and also the girl, Stacy; only by then he is mangled and hospitalized
from a wreck that occurred six months earlier. Widely scattered clues
allow the supposition that self-punishment has unconsciously motivated
the accident. Chief among these is the recurrent nightmare stemming
from Herby's crime: he would find himself in jail and charging with
lowered head at a spot of sweat on the wall of his cell. He shrugs off
the part of the meaning he can derive with the reflection, "Everybody
had suicide dreams." When the mechanism fails in his speeding car, he
is hurled through the windshield and flat against a wall. Yet a large
factor of coincidence persists. To avoid excessive explicitness younger
writers will sometimes tend, as I think Tyner does, toward the opposite
extreme of explanatory reticence.
The closing scene impresses one as arbitrary and contrived. Stacy,
wildly promiscuous, heavily habituated to pot, hard and independent,
had had casual sexual relations with Herby during their brief acquaint–
ance before the accident, and he had lain in a coma during the inter–
vening half year. Now at the hospital she sweetly but improbably
proposes to take charge of his long recuperation and expresses the
hope of their sharing a life. This saccherine melting into a Hollywood
fadeout proves as disappointing as unexpected - if taken, that is,
straight.
The occasional shifting of narrative attention away from the central
character and unto a lesser one introduces the most fascinating aspect
of the novel. Lamont, a fourteen-year-old shoeshine boy, had witnessed
r
