PARTISAN REVIEW
119
cised from their often interminable former formal corpi" - i.e., snatches
of Mozart, four bars of Vivaldi, a trill of Chopin's, a snippet of "Clair
de Lune.")
Sam Hooperl (to be distinguished from Sam Hooper2, his double, a
famous television personality who is never physically present in the
narrative, but who is a constant potential) is the young but not very
youthful keeper of promises, very American, very credible, a kind of
managerial prodigy whose advancement in his "corporation"
is
in in–
verse ratio to his spiritual decline. Sam is an employee of something
called Management Concern, which seems to embrace as much of the
universe as is predictable. He is entirely unconnected, lonely, unde–
fmed. A jaunty nihilist, but a gentleman; a voice, or a babble of voices,
we
somehow believe. Sam, like the writer of such fiction, is "keeping a
promise at all costs," though the nature of the promise is not clear. He
becomes inexplicably entangled with the Grassgreen family - the plump,
neurotic, sleazy, but rather attractive Odile; her husband Aaron, a
photographer-artist; her two children, whom he wants desperately to
adopt by the end of the novel. For a while he is fascinated by Odile,
and when their affair is comically exposed to her husband Odile at–
tempts suicide by drowning, discovers that the lake has turned to ice
too thick to crack beneath her, heads out into a storm, and winds up
in
a Pumping Station out in the lake. Aaron ascends to Sam's fashion–
able lakeside apartment, with an instrument of destruction that turns out
to
be his camera.
Sam's problems, we are told, are commonplace and "of our time":
he cannot focus on anything. He is not quite real to himself though he
has all his report cards and other boyhood records to study. "As each
year he had inched away from the certainties his psychic privileges af–
forded him, he had begun to wonder if the expensive matched luggage
of his training might not have been put on the wrong flight." He drinks
too much. He suffers an unaccountable knot in his chest. He
is
astigmatic,
and he
can
correct this only at the cost of a squinting, lopsided face.
His gums bleed at night; his friend and sidekick, his housemaid, turns
out to be a man. His mistress, Odile, has lost one of her contact lenses,
and is diagnosed as a pseudoschizo, a quite ordinary and banal per–
sonality.
Much skillful dialogue, farcical events, indeed the "literary amuse–
ments" also promised on the title page, a witheringly intelligent vision, a
near-perfect use of words -
The Promisekeeper
makes many promises
and keeps most of them, though it remains ultimately mysterious and
tantalizing. It is a most difficult work to analyze and to read.
Newman's first novel,
New A xis)
was as unbalancing as
The Prom-
