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JOYCE CAROL OATES
Julian Singer is a writer and editor, but his real vocation is the
constructing of
What Happens Next?
and he uses, perhaps transforms
or distorts or betrays, everyone around him. They are always about to
become stereotypes - the wisecracking wife, the mysterious father, the
precocious stepson, the alcoholic ex-husband, Singer himself ("Antihero,"
certainly) - and yet they resist categorization, just as Singer resists final–
ly adding them up to anything, fixing them in place, declaring them
known. They are given a kind of tentative form by Singer'S speculative
narrations about them, but the form is never permanent ; they can easily
be reimagined, glimpsed out a window doing some odd thing and then
erased, and reimagined elsewhere. The narrator tries on aspects of
personality in an experimental way and, in the course of the book, grows
in wisdom, despair, but also in joy. " I fear the purpose of my life is to
relate it. Of course, narration gives it form, like one of those puzzles
solved by connecting numbered dots. But you would need an almost
infinite number. Can I say I lead my life to give me something to say?"
Yes, certainly. Yet this almost modish existential statement is ut–
tered in the context of a man who both is and is not, is never, isolated:
he carries around with him, in his head, all his selves, all the people he
loves or cannot escape. The only problem with Singer's particular life,
his wife tells him, is that no part of it has happened to anyone else.
Working with so much that is familiar, Rogin has accomplished a
unique vision and, in what is only his second book, seems to have
brought to near perfection his own style. Perhaps the answer to his ques–
tion - What Happens Next? - will be, for Rogin, an exploration of
another kind of fiction altogether.
Diane Johnson's
Burning,
like Rogin's book, takes risks: the most
immediate being its setting out to deal with many of the same subjects
that Alison Lurie did in her very well received
The Nowhere City.
Like
Miss Lurie, Diane Johnson shows us odd behavior in Southern Califor–
nia, seen through the eyes of a fairly bland young couple named Bingo
and Barney; there is also a charismatic and eccentric psychiatrist; and
the usual props, the vegetation and the swimming pools and the out–
landish people.
The Nowhere City
is considered by many people to be
the best novel about Los Angeles, if one doesn't take
The Day of the
Locust
into account ; it is surely a very perceptive, wise, satisfying work.
It
is very human, believable: in its charting of the almost total meta–
morphosis of a young New England woman, it means much more to us
than West's brilliant novel which is unforgettable but not really mov–
ing.
Burning
is both a more superficial and a more serious novel than
Alison Lurie's, and what is extraordinary about it is its demonstration
of real insight, a real sense of horror - aimless half-comic incomplete
