Second-Chance Continent
As If She Were Mine. By Alex Hamilton (Hut- chinson New Authors, 18s.)
The Favourite. By Frangoise Mallet-Joris. Trans-
lated by Herma Briffault. (W. H. Allen, 16s.) MARK TWAIN, Henry James, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe—how many hundreds more of American writers who dealt, explicitly or implicitly, with Europe's in- fluence on expatriate Americans? (It would be more of a test of skill to ask for a list of American writers who didn't.) To approach the subject at all, at this stage, is rather like trying to squeeze orange juice out of a strip of dry peel, and to do so in a novel starkly called Europe is more ambitious still. But Mr. Stern has already tried his luck with television—that sitting duck which so many satirists have unsportingly shot at and unmistakably missed—and come up with the brilliantly funny novel Golk. Europe is just as successful. Mr. Stern's material may be tradi- tional, but his handling of it is original, indi- vidual and expert.
His Europe is the war-stricken shell-crater of the Marshall Plan years. particularly Heidelberg and Paris; his theme is a quotation from Nietzsche : 'Every man of character has a typi- cal experience which recurs over and over again.' What you get out of places depends on what you put into them; the famous American non- conformist's dream of Europe as a second- chance continent, where the first shall be last and the last first, is a mirage. Schreiber, running from a disastrous marriage in New England to the scene of a disastrous love-affair in war-time France, ends up as the manager of a night-club , in Beirut, sadder but ho wiser, third time un- lucky, deserted by a predatory German bitch who qualifies for the Sally Bowles Award for in-
spired selfishness. Baggish, a natural faller on his feet, marries his way into a good slice of the German economic miracle (the Kammerbusch paint factory, an ex-subsidiary of I. G. Farben); Ward, a natural tourist, ends as he began with a Baedeker in one hand, notebook in the other.
Moving these characters around at the speed of a Cook's tour, Mr. Stern knocks down one. illusion after another (theirs and ours) with an ironical offhandedness; his humour is dry but not cold, fantastic but not formless. He has an extraordinary economy both of phrase and of incident, and the guiding light of his intelligence gives a kind of authority to even his wildest picaresque inventions (although Schreiber's dells ex machina, the owner of the night-club, was a little too much of a cute thing). He is more like Nigel Dennis—whose first novel, Boys and Girls Come Out to Play, was another Americans-in- Europe romp—than any other contemporary; less insistently paradoxical, but more stream- lined and more lively. There is a sheer pleasure in reading Mr. Stern which calls for gratitude rather than assessment; I am duly grateful, and recommend Europe to the world.
I also recommend (form ulw of praise are hard to find) Alex Hamilton's As If She Were Mine, which is broad, warm, human and all that, but in a pleasantly mild and un-selfconscious way. It is one of those murder stories without a murder (to be more explicit would give away a nicely constructed plot) which always remind me of non-alcoholic wines, and takes place in the Thames-side house of a professional por- nographer (military history an uncommercial but passionate sideline) who finds himself sheltering a girl self-imposedly on the run. Their mutual cross-purposes and deceptions carry the plot along briskly, and the pornographer-narrator's style is comfortably relaxed, with a tendency to facetious long-windedness which weighs a bit heavy. The minor characters mostly appear in pubs and are the sort of minor characters who do appear in pubs, if you like that sort of thing.
The Favourite, on the other hand, is a very thick bowl of pudding indeed, as claustrophobi- cally dense as the laws of current French fiction demand. As the blurb claims, it is far from a conventional historical novel; but it has some passages which, with the help/ of the translator, fall into some well-known pigeon-holes:
If she is not engaged in intrigue, he thought. I shall lose a trump card, for the game will seem too easy to the Cardinal to be worth a bishopric for me. One more reason to encourage her in it.
'The characteristics of Court intrigues,' the same character later muses, 'is that they propa- gate themselves indefinitely, endlessly, and, one might think, aimlessly.' (One might also think. ungrammatically; I have not misquoted.) These characteristics are realistically brought out, in page after intricate page; in telling the story of how Mlle de La Fayette, briefly in favour with Louis XIII, was driven into a convent by Riche- lieu's machinations, Mlle Mallet-ions spares us nothing, and uses every narrative device to irritate 'her readers, from flashbacks to extracts from posthumous memoirs. Personally I was as bored by this as by Montherlant's Cardinal d'Espagne, and only came to life during the moments when Mlle de La Fayette's decision to enter a convent was in question : a genuine innocent among genuine crooks, she is a touch- ing as well as psychologically interesting study. But such moments were rare: it was as if, during a performance of The Affair, one had caught a glimpse off-stage of the Princesse de Cleves.
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