118
JOYCE CAROL OATES
IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
THE
PROMISEKEEPER.
By
Charles Newman. Simon
&
Schuster. $7.95.
Charles Newman's second novel,
The Promisekeeper,
is
even
more polished and enigmatic than
New Axis,
which was a serenely
jarring little work not quite a novel and not quite a group of stories.
Like
New Axis,
the new novel is a feat of style, a continuous
performance
on the part of the author - who is mysteriously present throughout,
omnipotent and helpless as his protagonist, a man trapped
in
a deathly
comedy. That Newman is always performing is by no means an indica–
tion of his being egotistically involved in his fiction; on the contrary,
one feels in reading and rereading
The Promisekeeper
that its robust and
desperate humor, its stunning dialogue, its deranged settings, are elabor–
ate distractions for both author and sympathetic reader, for we need
most of all to keep from going mad.
Look, there is something sufficiently
crazy out the window!
- Newman seems to be consoling us. "No trans–
port can be of vehicular note or particular weight when there're so
many ways, uh, to round this world."
The novel is both comic and deadly, but not grotesquely comic; it
it a comedy of immediate possibility.
It
is more mysterious than the
zoned-off world of, say, Nabokov's
Ada,
mainly because it is American
and should be comprehensible. And Newman is much more civilized
than Nabokov, who seems not to be drowning, not seriously,
in
his own
fictional worlds, though he has the energy to arrange for the extra–
vagant drownings of others. Newman 'exhibits some of Nabokov's self–
sustaining irony, his sense of the closed, airless, hilariously doomed sys–
tems human beings construct for one another.
The Promisekeeper
is
advertised as a "tephrarnancy," "certain profane stoical paradoxes ex–
plained," "partitioned with documents and conditioned by imagoes"; that
exotic word "tephramancy" has been thoughtfully translated by the
blurb writer (who had a rough time of his vocation with this one) as a
"divination by means of ashes, esp. from an altar or ruined temple."
Whose ashes? Whose temple? Of the divination we can be reason–
ably certain: things "seem to die all around" the stoical hero. Noble
birds dash themselves against Parking Towers, and die; grasses die; a
woman's skull is split open and her brains tum quickly from pink to
gray; the hero, Sam Hoopert, himself suffers a kind of death at the
novel's odd conclusion, fortified in his stereo-lounger with appropriate
background music for what he assumes will be his murder. (The ap–
propriate music is a tape, "The Sounds of Genius," "great themes ex-
