PARTISAN REVIEW
475
Advancing Paul N ewman
looks b'lck from the McCarthy campaign of
1968 to the lives of I1a Rappaport and Kitsy Frank, who me. as college girls in
Europe in the summer of 1959 and remained best fri ends through the follow–
ing decade. The book 's design is elaborately cinematic, cutting regularly be–
tween campa ign incidents and earlier events in the girls' lives, so that the past
moves toward u s even as the narra tive present advances more slowly, with the
assassina tion o f Robert Kenn edy and the death of Ki tsy's husband in Vietnam
marking the eventua l co inciding of the two time tracks. The ingenuity of this
feels rather mechanica l fo r a while, but gradua ll y one accepts it as a metaphor
for the sense of history the novel intends. We do remember our lives as if they
were old movies, and it can be shocking to discover, as do I1a and Kitsy, that
o urselves wa tching the mo vie is pa rt of the movie, that we remember not from
outside our lives but from in side them , still there as a po tential terminus for
action s tha t are ye t to be completed .
And the structure d raws upon our understanding that we live in and
through media more largely than it's a ltogether comforta ble to recognize. The
girl s enter the adult wo rld as bright college girl s (and boys) used to do fre–
quentl y, working a t a succession of jobs in publishing, educational television,
film agencies, promo tion of va rious- sorts. The book's catchy title-I1a and
Kitsy work with an adva nce team- for McCarthy's appearances in California
that for a memorable few days includes Paul Newman himself-puts the irony
forward . The actor is mo re vividly and compellingly rea l than the politician
who's nomina lly the center o f it all. History is a promotion itself, a media
event, so tha t fo r mos t o f u s the '60's are framed between seeing (say) the
Bea tles' first perfo rmance on the Ed Sullivan Show and J ohnson 's abdica tion
speech. "Wha t happened " is reduced to reca lling where we were and how we
felt when a given newness, u sua ll y horrifying, appeared on the lUbe.
As public and priva te events blur together and become a lmost indistin–
gui shable from invented commercia l-aestheti c events, it gets very hard to
be
oneself. I1a and Kitsy first made connection by discovering that they liked and
could quote from the same Wo rld War II movies (they'd of course missed the
war itself); and when Kitsy fina lly has to grieve for her dead husband she's hard
put to it to find an adequa tely personal way:
I won 't think you 're brave I won't think you 're sma rt I'll hate you I'll
scream fool fool-would he h ave fought for himself? got killed in three
days-hero starr louis sta rr mrs starr-cheering-Ieader-music swell s,
oh loui s- g renade in a ditch gonna kill gooks-john wayne idiot arching
back like paul muni in no rway bleeding like gone with the wind anatole
kuragin without a leg john lennon red-crotched and comforting woman 's
face seamed with tendern ess comes over the hill-it'll be a ll right dear it'll
be a ll right.
This difficulty is ha rdly peculiar to women , and the impressive thing
abo ut
A dvancing Pau l N ewman
is tha t Bergs tein , while giving u s I1a and
