618
PARTISAN REVIEW
figures, strong men who can cope with life , etc.
It
is sentimentalizing that
nothing can rescue . Woiwode is too good a writer to fall into these traps, but
he consistently handles Charles, the son who goes to New York, in this way
while he is in New York. He changes from a thoroughly interesting child
into a foil against which trite generalizations can be played .
In a very real way,
Beyond the Bedroom Wall
has the same kind of fic–
tional rationale as do
Look Homeward, Angel
and
Of Time and the River.
It's a fond and penetrating look at a lost life , a way of laying ghosts. And
like Wolfe, Woiwode cannot resist the temptation to make his people into
giants-taciturn, brave, deep, wise, beautiful, effective , strong. Their very
plainness is tortured into heroism. To handle plain people plainly, and at
the same time to make them reveal the truth about themselves and their
community is quite possibly the hardest thing that a writer can do. There
they stand: dull, boring, ordinary-yet unique and absolute . How to make
them interesting? But is that even the question? I don 't think so . The ques–
tion may be: How does one carry the plainness into fiction so that the
character does not become a Character, does not become a falsification?
Flaubert did it, and so, in our own literature, did Williams, two writers un–
canny in their ability to find the glint of truth in the most banal situations.
We see, through their ordinary characters, an entire world without distortion
of either world or characters. Woiwode 's characters, in so far as they are gi–
gantic, are unreliable . They are, so to speak, historical without being
history.
Despite these faults, it is a good book, one among a paltry few each
year. For this reason alone, it is notable . As I have said , its author is
talented, but I feel, ungenerously, that Woiwode has not demanded enough
of his talents in this novel. Nowhere does he chop and fight against his ma–
terial. There is no section, no chapter, no paragraph that strikes as being
written uphill, written against what came most readily to hand . The novel
takes the path of least resistance throughout, and one gets the sense that the
author, in composing the book, discovered nothing that he did not already
know . The whole is a kind of explication of given materials and ideas, a vast
set-piece . The work lives in that area in which the author is comfortable . The
novel lacks what can be called a poetic impulse- though it is filled with
"poetry. " It is talented.
It
is professional.
It
is, God knows, well written.
But it is not enough .
GILBERT SORRENTINO
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