BOOKS
THREE NOVELS
FALLING IN PLACE. By Ann BeaUle.
Random House. $10.95
LOON LAKE. By E.l. Doctorow.
Random House. $11.95
629
THE SECOND COMING. By Walker Percy.
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux.
$12.95
To deal immediately with the obvious in
Loon Lake:
it is all
a piece of reflection. There are two narratives, two writers, Warren
Penfield and Joe Korzeniowski, two of this, two of that, and all this
doubling in the text is metafictively redoubled. Joseph Korzeniowski,
after all, is the Polish name of Joseph Conrad. The name is pasted
on Joe K. at the end of the novel and it functions like an asterisk.
There is doubtful matter here; something is omitted. How is Joe K.
like Joseph Conrad? Well, Conrad abandoned Polish for English,
moved from ship to shore, from without to within , and became at
last a Very Important Person. To the extent that Joe K. is an
arriviste,
he is like Conrad - and there the resemblance ends. He is
without Conradian intelligence, incapable of Conradian reflection,
and as a writer he has no standing whatever beside Conrad. A
hustler who rises to the summit of American imperial power, Joe K.
writes himself out of a grimy proletarian fiction into the happy lan–
guage of the American success fable , and does not ask what is lost in
the translation. Yet, there is a shadowy question in the looseness of
the analogy, for E .
L.
Doctorow has himself gone from writing un–
profitably in the Conradian tradition about losers ,
The Book ofDaniel,
to the stunts and tricks of a popularized metafiction in
Ragtime.
What
is
lost in the translation?
Loon Lake
is about Making It, and making it
big, and at the same time it broods about failure, it points to the
absence of Conradian depth , and reflects .
Joe K. begins the novel and ends it, drawing the fiction round
to this signature: "Master of Loon Lake." Mirrors, doubles, reflec–
tion. Loon Lake is a place in Nature and a place in the Mind, and it
is real estate, property. It belongs to the painter and poet, those kin–
dred spirits, and it belongs to the baronial capitalist. Above all, it is
the property of the novelist, who is truly the ultimate "Master of
Loon Lake." It is a guilty possession, an uncertain mastery, and this,
to a large extent, is what is in the reflection of Loon Lake: guilt, anx–
iety, betrayal, all the things that go with property. Loon Lake is a
