PARTISAN REVIEW
145
horror - and yet its consistent reliance upon conventional scenes, con–
ventional use of character and drawn-out dialogue, rather as if two
different people had written the nove!. One populated it with ghastly
possibilities and at least one ghastly reality (a description of two drug
addicts injecting heroin ); the other constructed each chapter as a
kind of lightweight serio-comic episode. The chapters are simply back–
to-back and don't contribute toward the characters' development or
awareness of themselves so that, by the conclusion - the much-awaited
Beverly Hills fire - the reader has grown so tired of both Barney and
Bingo (even their names are tiresome!) that their moment of exhausted
despair almost passes unnoticed. But it is an excellent one; lying in a
motel bed, fearing that their house is going to be burned down, that
their lives are somehow also threatened, they embrace each other des–
perately:
"Terrible, terrible, terrible. What will we do?"
"Of course it may not be burned down at al!."
" It
doesn't matter. We have each other."
"Terrible, terrible. What will we do?"
Conscious enough of her material's stereotyped eccentnclty that
she never takes it seriously, never wastes much time on it, Diane John–
son somehow fails to draw herself and her readers up out of it in order
to offer any unstereotyped judgment on it. The novel's people remain
subhuman, witless, semimoronic, totally unsympathetic, and yet - yet
not really negative, not sufficiently negative to allow us even the dubious
satisfaction of feeling that they are being punished in proportion to
their sins. And though she can recognize cliches in California life styles,
the author does not seem to recognize cliches of narrative technique;
sadly, this potentially intelligent novel is reminiscent of a series of relat–
ed television situation comedy shows, with outlandish zany characters
who almost do bad things but never quite succeed ... and about whom
we never worry.
The Professor's Daughter
will be, I hope, the last novel in our
civilization to begin with a quotation from
Democracy in America;
it is
certainly going to be the last novel that concludes with this paragraph
or anything approaching it:
Then, in January of 1968, a Senator from Minnesota - Eugene
McCarthy - declared that he would stand against the incumbent
President in the New Hampshire primary on the issue of the war
in Vietnam, and like so many other young Americans at that time,
Julius, Louisa, Laura and Danny made up their minds to go north
to help him and give the system one final chance.
