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PARTISAN REVIEW
American tall tale , and a narrative so dark and depressing that its view of our
particular abyss would have shaken that old cynic Twain .
The book is a set of variations on Newman 's travels, mainly in 1968 , in
England , France , East Europe, and the Soviet Union . One looks , ordinarily,
for a consistent narrator in books structured on international travel , against
whose consistency the flux of nationalities, personal encounters , the usual
missed trains and lost passports of such books is naturally set. Newman, how–
ever, is a picaro , elusive and Protean , at moments naive, at other moments so
penetrating and sophisticated that he dominates his landscape . At moments
he is the victim , an American gull among the Europeans, a figure from early
James, at other moments the escapee , a Houdini out of Evanston . Coupled
with this sense of the personal multiplicity of Newman as actor in the events
recorded is a shifting sense of Newman the writer, recording , with varying
distance , with some pride , with some remorse, with some surprise , the ad–
ventures of that self of several years before . No passage better expresses the
ironic intricacy I am trying to describe than one of the author 's marginal
comments on himself, after an especially bizarre episode.
As I reread this , I note a certain unsteadiness of tone , which if this were
fiction , I would correct. It is unclear , for example , whether the " nar–
rator " wants to be taken as larky or grim , searching or glib , confused or
wrong-headed , a relatively decent young man , or an arrogant prick. I do
kn ow this is how I acted then , but cannot to this day know whether to
attribute my redundant cruelty to a temporary paranoia , a deficiency of
charac ter or experience . And at that , I must leave it.
It is the marginalia from which I quote, an aspect of the design of the
book that is both visually startling and functionally impressive . Much of the
time the running account , often as scenically concrete as very good realistic
fiction , is set , in unjustified lines , against a marginal commentary that
represents a plausibly divided self, the Apollonian commenting on the
Dionysian , the critic on the novelist , the novelist on the autobiographer, the
cause on the effect , the idea on the action , with quotations from Mercia Eliade
and Sartre , Chairman Mao and Marx, Baudelaire and Stendhal, Brautigan
and Harry Crews , along with a large amount of dreck , from newspapers,
cookbooks , and public lavatory walls .
One of the consequences both of Newman 's ironic indeterminacy and of
his marginal juxtapositions is that the ideas within the book-and the book
bristles with insights , aphorisms, remembered quotes from other people 's
books , an intellectual life of remarkable grace and intensity-all exist within a
dramatic context. Early in the book Newman remarks, to a Yugoslav who asks
what the difference is between American prose and poetry , that the poets all
