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PARTISAN REVIEW
Her own responsibility may have been a bit less than charged. Berg
knows, now, that she could not have drawn up the protocols and reports
she is accused of wri ting-though she admi ts to having done so-s till hid–
ing her illi teracy. He thinks of telling this to the judge on the possibili ty
that her sentence might be mitigated. But he fails to do so. The narrator
remembers how his feelings seemed "numbed" during the trial. As he
gazes across the space of the court at the woman whose body was so thor–
oughly known to him, he feels no involvement. And it is a numbness he
detects in others-even the judges. And he reflects, now, that this same
numbness must have been felt, at the time, by the victims as well as the per–
petrators of the horrors of the death camps. The prisoners, themselves, as
survivor literature describes, must often have entered the state "in which
life's functions are reduced to a minimum, behavior becomes completely
selfish and indifferent to others, and gassing and burning are everyday
occurrences." He observes, too, that this same numbness has overcome the
generation to which he belongs. "That some few would be convicted and
punished while we of the second generation were silenced by revulsion,
shame and guilt-was that all that was to it now?" The story has some
continuity for us to discover beyond the moment when Hanna is sen–
tenced-a continuity in which he does not attempt to recover any intimate
relation with "the woman" of his youth though he sends her tape record–
ings. Eventually, she learns to read, and educates herself in prison, but
when she is about to be released, she hangs herself, and she leaves her sav–
ings to Holocaust victims. For Berg, the numbness remains.
John Burnham Schwartz's
Reservation Road
is another novel, finally ,
that seems to confine itself chiefly to the relation between two persons into
whose story history-book time does not directly enter. They are linked
arbitrarily by a terrible accident. Driving too fast on a dark country road,
Dwight Arno strikes and kills a boy, and goes straight on without taking
responsibility or being recognized. But Ethan Learner, the boy's father, is
determined to identify and bring to justice this murderer, and undertakes
a search for him. The men do not meet until the end of the book; yet by
that time their non-relation, after the terrible moment on lonely
Reservation Road, has become relation. Yet this short novel can be said to
be resonant with its sense of larger reference. As search and evasion pro–
long themselves we come to know and understand the nature of both men,
and we see them in the contexts of their separate lives, each as representa–
tive as the other of the commonplace, the familiar, the contemporary. The
novel consists of alternating monologues that not only relate events but
display the characters' private reflections. As a result, we see much more
than the action. What is shaped as a sort of suspense thriller is also a study
of the way many live whose lives contain no such melodrama.
