284
PARTISAN REVIEW
takes his dreary young hero so seriously-his voyeurism, his fantasies
of transgression in women's closets, his friendships with two junior
high school chums who play ping pong, Monopoly, Russian roulette
and even drink each other's blood (though without the gusto of Huck
and Tom). The ambiance here is all drenched Poe with no sense of the
frustrated passion and raging dream that makes the third chapter of
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
so authentic and gripping, and
such a touchstone for the subject of adolescence in modern fiction. A
further problem for me was that the narrator's voice seemed too
sophisticated to allow the reader to feel the stumbling agony of
manhood struggling to emerge, but capturing the voice of so vulner-
. able an age is a masterly ambition, as Henry James knew when he
began the modern age of experiment in fiction with
What Maisie Knew
and
The Awkward Age.
Of these three books by Millhauser, Spielberg
and Rooke, Millhauser's is the one that tries the hardest but succeeds
the least. And I don't think it is a good prospect for the movies!
JOHN TYTELL
..
Desmond MacCarthy once grilled a young novelist concern–
ing his motives for writing. Did he hope to become rich or famous or
powerful? to attract beautiful women? to improve civilization? to move
men's hearts? To each of these queries, with increasing perturbation,
the author answers: "No, I wish only to write novels!" Exasperated
himself, MacCarthy at last cries: "Then what will you write about?
It
looks to me as though your only subject will be the desire to write."
Doubtless, MacCarthy considered this crushing. But the authors of
these three volumes of literary criticism, commentary, and interviews
would be ready to answer that, for them and for the writers they value,
the desire to write is indeed the proper ,subject for novels.
The New
Fiction
consists of interviews by Bellamy and six others of a dozen
novelists (Barth, Oates, Gass, Barthelme, Sukenick, Tom Wolfe,
Hawkes, Sontag, Reed, Kosinski, Gardner, and Vonnegut). Klinkowitz
discusses many of the same writers, as well as Baraka, James Park
Sloan, Federman, and Gilbert Sorrentino. And Federman's book is a
collection of critical disquisitions on the new fiction, with pieces
written by many of the same novelists-here, as frequently, turned
