BOOKS
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case, is probably too angry to care what the narrative mode is at this
point. Thomas has played so many games, so fast and loose, that
one assumes he doesn't care how we read it. As he bails out of this
covert, self-indulgent novel, it is every man for himself. Lisa goes to
Israel (seen here as a redemptive paradise), works things out with
mother and father, opens up to love and eros, etc. Death is seen as
the other side of a successful psychoanalysis. The suggestion seems
to be that the death urge only appears to be ominous (as if Freud
needn't have been so alarmed) and is actually no more than a
precognitive urge to move on to the next stage of existence, which is
redemptive, and better than life.
The kindest reader may wonder, at the end, if such elaborate
peregrinations were necessary to reach this particular destination.
The back-to-front construction of the book is a brave and
intrinsically fascinating idea, but it puts a great deal of pressure on
the ending. Some books can sustain a weak ending, but
The White
Hotel
cannot. The various sections of this book are like elaborate,
highly decorated checks for vast amounts, and the end is like a trip to
the bank, where one discovers, sadly, that they can't be cashed.
FRANK CONROY
BLACKMUR AND ADAMS
HENRY ADAMS. By
R.P.
Blackmur.
Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich. $19.95.
The projective recognitions of critics are well known - and
may be an honorable way of meeting literature. For R.P. Blackmur,
Henry Adams was the writer that seems to walk out of the past to be
recognized as one's self. Though they were both New Englanders,
their worlds and their times were different; after all, Blackmur was
only a boy of fifteen when Adams died at the age of eighty in 1919.
Yet there was a temperamental affinity between them, and they
shared a sense of surviving on the margin. Deliberate marginality
