BOOKS
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for locale and for the combination of camaraderie and loneliness that small
towns throw up like gas stations. He's very good with children-the Neu–
miller offspring are excellently given, each sketched in a new pose from
chapter to chapter as they grow up, so that we see them as discrete entities,
not boring instances of development. And his children are neither cute nor
monstrous.
Tim,
as the son who is "left out," might in fact stand as a per–
fect paradigm of how fictionally to handle a strange child without making
him into a wind-up toy like the dopey little girl in
The Bad Seed,
for exam–
ple. A minor point, but children draw many a dishonest writer on to his de–
served destruction . It's much easier to fake adults.
Woiwode often shifts from the third-person into the first and this
should work to change the pace and mood of the work. Sadly, though, every
time a character thinks in the first person he becomes startlingly articulate,
literary, and often pretty flowery. These instances draw Woiwode into his
most egregious writing flaw, i.e., the urge toward profundity. For some rea–
son, he finds it almost impossible to handle scenes that deal with profundity
of emotion or the " mystery of life" without sliding into a thick , clotted rhe–
toric that serves only to muddy and cheapen the very emotions he wants to
reveal. I'm tempted to say that Mr . Woiwode thinks of this writing as
poetic , whereas it is but another assault upon that embattled art. When he
describes what people
do
in the grip of deep feeling, he is fine, as witness
the first chapter, "Burial." But when he wants to tell the reader what peo–
ple
feel
his prose becomes, for all practical purposes, inarticulate . It's almost
as
if
these emotional sets generate' 'thoughts that lie too deep for tears" and
the language that attempts to carry them collapses into gunk. This is the op–
posite of the way poetic language functions, in which the writing becomes
clearer as the emotion is focused more sharplv.
The people who inhabit the novel are well-drawn, although some of
them are too well-drawn, that is, they are Characters with a capital'
'c."
There is a drunken hired man out of central casting, Greenwich Village
denizens carting around language and paraphernalia that even a plumber
like Tom Wolfe could recognize as spelling "stoned hippie," a third-rate
Lower East Side poet who comes across like John Carradine, and who is quite
predictably-although I was rooting for Woiwode-bittersweetly shattered.
These are all instances oflapses of attention, failures of energy.
The weakest writing in the book occurs after the children are grown and
gone from home. It occurs to me that Mr. Woiwode may be lost when he's
out of his territory. Certainly, his New York scenes are hopeless, surrender–
ing his absolute sense of place for stock pieces that could be written into
scenes for Broadway plays-"Strange and Frenetic New York." Some
countermen in a Ukrainian restaurant on Avenue A are turned into noble
