292
PARTISAN REVIEW
through the grid of her plan for them, are painfully thin. Violet's first
person narrative-chatty, ironic, self-denigrating-is so wry that it
nearly makes us indifferent
to
what happens, and we are grateful for
the liberation from inertia that occurs at the end of the book, not so
much because it provides an upbeat ending, but because it brings
to
a
halt the grinding ironic tone of voice in which the book is written.
It
is
only at the end, too, that Violet becomes believable as an artist. Until
then her identity as a painter seems merely researched, and her career as
an illustrator doesn't merit her anguish or our interest.
In
the last
pages, however, as she lives out her ultimatum, taking the time and
space to paint, Violet speaks about the painting process in a way that is
plausible and attentive, giving herself instructions that Godwin herself
might heed as a writer:
She appears
LO
be crafted out of the light, so continuously and
harmoniously do the pans of her body mesh with its contours. And
yet I need her outline, too. Otherwise it will be just blobs of light. ...
(Yet) the main thing is
LO
get the model sketched in and then,
quickly, over the pencil outline, try to capture those fugitive con–
tours of light. Yes, leave out the book. That's
LOa
particular.
Zip: A Novel of the Left and the Right
mates the schlemiel of the
Jewish novel of the fifties with the whimsy and politics of the pop
novels of the sixties and the result is a hybrid that--should be palatable
but is curiously uninteresting as an entire book. Ira Goldstein, young,
not particularly bright, narrates the story, a first person wistfully
retrospective address to the Puerto Rican middleweight fighter whose
career he managed and who becomes a radical, denouncing the
narrator and his country. Max Apple's astuteness about the complexi–
ties of political sentiments is visible in the book, but is not taken far.
What he wants is a cartoon novel, a theme that's to be respected for its
riffs and variations-appearances by Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda,
J.
Edgar Hoover, Howard Cosell, and a powerful grandmother who rasps
through the book like a comic death rattle.
Apple is a very good writer, a funny writer, and at times that seems
to be enough: the fountain of genial chicken-flavored speech is
delightful, his imagination is rich, he tells us interesting little stories.
Yet the telling is finally too flavored for anything but talk to matter;
the characters don't mean anything
to
one another but only to the
author, whose pleasure in them derives from his opportunity to use
language on them:
