146
JOYCE CAROL OATES
It will be distinguished as the only novel in print to allow a secret F.B.1.
informer to say, with great effect, to a girl having a "bad trip"; "There's
a lot that's good in life. . . . I mean, there's love and having kids and
books and music and painting and ideas. I guess we lose those things
sometimes, and they get kind of poisoned for us here in the States, but
they're there ... you wait and see."
Where Rogin and Johnson consider stereotypes and stereotyped
behavior, wittily, analytically, the young English author Piers Paul
Read seems to be writing about them for the first time, almost glory–
ing in them: the generation gap, the Establishment-millionaire-Harvard
professor and his cool, slightly alcoholic wife, the daughter who goes to
Berkeley and meets only one young man (a "hippie"), the other daughter
who embarks upon the obligatory LSD trip and must be rescued . . .
and the plotting revolutionaries (the professor's political science seminar
at Harvard, which includes a mad Jesuit, the F.B.1. informer, and a
bright but emotional Jewish boy ) . . . and nymphomania that is the
result of a thwarted Electra complex (thwarted? - and if it had been
acted out?) ... but which disappears, abruptly, without a trace, as
the novel's plot moves into the college kids' radical plan to kill a minor
right-wing politician . . . an obviously doomed plan, but noble in its
way, we feel, and it is unfortunate that the professor is killed by the
mad Jesuit just as he was coming around to realizing the truths of
Consciousness III. . . .
The Professor's Daughter
begins well, though melodramatically;
and then immediately it parades forth its cast of stereotypes, nearly
every person, every utterance, every aspect of its plot (again the hotel
that has only one room - one bed - and there's no other hotel in
town, the hour is late, etc.) , and one reads on only out of a sense of
despairing fascination.
It
is not finally important that so contrived a
novel should find its way to publication at a reputable house, or even
that other novels by this writer have evidently received prizes (in En–
gland) - for all I know his American settings completely unhinged his
powers of imagination, and he is quite good with English settings;
what is important is the ease with which the apparently serious - deadly
serious - issues of estrangement, political bankruptcy, the disaffection
of youth, can be converted into the most ordinary of narratives, as if
the sixties had been finished now for several decades and a hundred
novels already written about them. In a sense,
The Professor's Daughter
is every writer's nightmare: you try for
Mr. Sammler's Planet
and its
elegant timeliness, its namedropping, its rhetoric, its affirmative end–
ing, but something goes wrong . . . or maybe just a few
mon~hs
pass
swiftly . . . and. . . .
Joyce Carol Oates
