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JOSEPH PEQUIGNEY
ciplined and understated imagination. The urban settings are sketched
in with sharp, sure strokes. He can evoke the ambience of poolrooms
and bars, and he can render the types, the activities and the talk to
be found in them, in vivid detail and pulsating concreteness.
If
he
sometimes overindulges his facility, devoting too much space to at–
mospheric effects and his gallery of minor figures, the lingerings are
compensated by a mastery reminiscent of Fitzgerald's.
In
Listen Ruben Fontanez,
a second novel, Jay Neugeboren, like
Tyner, elects realism, and like him places the action against the
swarming, variegated life of an American metropolis, in this case
New York. Neugeboren touches upon a different set of current prob–
lems - those of ethnic minorities, of discipline in the schools, of
poverty and welfare, and of gangs of delinquents - but, again like
Tyner, he regards these rather as patterns integral to the social fabric
than as problems to
be
solved or protested.
The heart of the narrative lies in the unfolding relationship between
a Jewish teacher in his midsixties and a Puerto Rican pupil in his
midteens. Harry Meyers, a widower and childless, aspires above all to
avoid the fate of his six older brothers, all of whom had died before
the age of sixty-nine. Ruben Fontanez makes voodoo dolls, and fashions
one, complete with pins, in the likeness of his teacher of Hebrew, who,
seizing it in his classroom at a junior high school in Williamsburg, is
both charmed and perturbed. That incident generates intimacy between
the two - conflict passing into affection - during the course of which
Ruben and two companions, Marty and Manuel, adopt Mr. Meyers,
care for him in illness, show him their ingenious means of survival
and their haunts in hidden corners of the city, and save him from a
vengeful attack by the brother of a Negro murderer whom he had once
apprehended. While Ruben gains courage, maturity and trust from their
association, the main point is the humanization of the protagonist. After
his "games with three children" - "It is you who are playing the fool,
Harry Meyers," he tells himself - he returns to teaching, which in
his illness he had determined to abandon, and returns in a drastically
altered frame of mind. Though he knows himself afflicted with cancer,
for example, to live beyond sixty-nine has ceased to be an obsession.
The foolish games with the children make him wiser, enabling
him
to
face his brief future with new tolerance, self-reliance, openness and
generosity.
Listen Ruben Fontanez
has a clearer and more fully articulated
design than
Shoot It,
though a less complex and inventive one. Neuge–
boren optimistically attributes to personal communion a capacity to
l
