132
MAUREEN HOWARD
Like counters in a dream Lockett then nudges out even the mythical
Nog, and the narrator says, "I have no memories except for Lockett.
He's coming on. Nog has been cancelled."
Nog
is in a recognizable tradition of self-conscious literary modern–
ism. The narrator is in accord with the gentleman in Beckett's
Watt
who notes a tiny slip, a change in his universe:
To conclude from this that the incident was intentional would, I
think,
be
rash. For my-how shall I say?-my personal system was
so distended at the period of which I speak that the distinction be–
tween what was inside it and what was outside it was not at all
easy
to draw.
The real strength of Wurlitzer's novel lies not so much in its intellectual
fashion as in its complete and honest treatment of the Hip world. It is
all
there, never with the false gusto of
The Village Voice,
but with
understanding and tenderness-the communal living with its touching
middle-class laundry problems, the ritualized sex, the lost cool of tough
old Meredith, "I'm sick of not having a decent change of underwear, of
dirty fingernails, of fucking in the sand, of eating out of cans, of not
having enough make-up, or irregular hours." A hard life, God knows.
The battle for a freedom from the past in
Nog
is equally hard and de–
feating in the end.
Recently, a silly article in
The New York Times,
"Young Writers
Say They Don't Read," trundled out Kurt Vonnegut again as the one
exception. "Vonnegut is one writer who's on the beam. He writes cine–
matically-charting themes through time, literarizing jump-cut techniques
and split-screen effects." Cinematically! There can be no higher praise.
The enchantment of having found a writer who can be talked about in
this stylish way makes the young forget, if they ever knew, that D. W.
Griffiths perfected the split-screen, that Faulkner can be read for montage
or Fitzgerald for a wipe. They are happy with their discoveries: one of
the young writers who doesn't read (James Kunen, participant in the
Columbia riots and author of
The Strawberry Statement)
admits, "It's
just easier to go to a movie and let it all wash over you." Vonnegut he
likes.
Mother Night
in particular: "It very strongly stresses the bluriness
of good and evil and the gratuitousness of how things come about."
Kurt Vonnegut's new novel may not be as satisfying to his young
audience as the other novel he has written for them so often.
It
is, to
begin with, a much better book. He wants to tell his history as a pris–
oner of war, during which he witnessed the firebombing of Dresden,
one doomsday in our apocalyptic time.
Slaughterhouse-Five
has a slight
autobiographical frame for the story of B1lly Pilgrim, prisoner of war, wit–
ness
to the firebombing of Dresden but there the identification ends.
