The Vonnegut Novel
Cod Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. By Kurt Vonne- gut Jr. (Cape, 21s.) Who are the Violets Now? By Auberon Waugh. (Chapman and Hall, 21s.)
We. have experienced the anti-novel, the poeme romanesque, the cut-tip novel. Now to the Vonnegut novel. This, as one of his hippy holy men might say, is something else. Mr. Vonnegut has been idiotically categorised as 'science fic- tion'—because his black comedies do not plop snugly into the papier-mfich6 fiction egg-tray, and because he hasn't issued any large statements about technical departures. Cod Bless You, Mr. Rose- water is, like his ravishing Cat's Cradle, com- posed as a table of apophthegms, la Roche- foucauld's Maxims for another age of chaos. New characters arrive, rounded and relevant, up to the last page. No plot, rather a central idea spot- lit from cunningly shifted angles.
Eliot Rosewater is a saintly booby. lie wants to shower his inherited wealth upon the un- deserving poor. He sets up as volunteer fireman and Miss Lonelyhearts, ready at a telephone ring to rescue the burned and the broken. He puts stickers in kiosks: 'Don't kill yourself. Call the Rosewater Foundation.' In one, somebody's added : 'Eliot will give you love and money. If you'd rather have the best piece of tail in southern Indiana, call Melissa.' Love is okay, but to tourniquet the dollar leakage in pounce a lawyer who has a pin-up of Roy Cohn over his bed and the Rosewater elders outraged by Eliot's concern for 'the maggots in the slime on the bottom of the human garbage pail.' Eliot wins for the maggots. There is a trace of Catch 22's antic wildness, but the explosive ridicule is inten- sified by the condensed wisdom and wit of a dazzlingly original talent.
Eliot's 'work of art,' to love the unattractive and useless, is subtler than the old Saroyan creed that everyone is useful and beautiful. That is a simpler hosanna, but harder to detail. The cinders of this philosophy are raked into One Day in the Afternoon of the World, a wistfully mopey account of a demo& Armenian play- wright's losing battle with blood-sucking com- merce, told in grey escalations of dialogue. Lost battle? Well, among his souvenirs, with the rejection slips, are his integrity and the tender memory of 'the little old lady who baked the small loaves.' I wish I could gladsomely munch the proffered crust.
Mr. Mankowitz's slender fable is cast with mammies, limbo dancers, hot-gospellers, cricketers and magic talking animals. There are some cal- culated squirts of aerosol frangipani, and this laughter-and-tears Caribbean eerily resembles the East Ham street markets, a sort of My Old Man's An Obeahman. Still, he avoids the feared arch- ness like a circus rider weaving around barrels, a deft but circuitously aimless ride.
It has at least a generous spirit, not the word that wings to mind with Auberon Waugh's new knock at our loathsome civilisation. It shows no advance on his previous novels : the same pimply disdain and smart callousness. Predict- ably, the targets are progressive ninnies, CND, abstract painters, Pope John, magazine editors and funny Negroes. Excellent. But satire requires
either a more informed venom or a sunnier com- passion than Mr. Waugh is capable of. The crudity of his contempt, as his inept hero blunders through the contemporary scene to his banal death, is a hooligan viewpoint, no less loutish for a coating of education.
A Set of Wives displays an authoritative know- ledge of London's inner circle left, the couplings and wheeler-dealings of shadow ministers, parlia- mentary columnists and their womenfolk:This is unhappy Hampstead, the messy sexuality of high bohemia's flaccid permissiveness. The Of Human Bondage situation remains unrealised. Incipient madness is supposedly the cause of Miranda wrecking her successful marriage to have it off with her Lunchtime O'Booze in crummy hotels. It is never believable. Nor will it do that she herself cannot 'explain the inexplicable.' To leave it there is abdication of the novelist's job. What worries me more is the thin note of vindictiveness persisting throughout, a sourness towards these Intelligent, charming and gifted people,' as if an obscure grudge is being paid off against the characters. However, you can almost see why.
Wilfrid Sheed's autopsy on the cadaver of a suburban marriage is marvellous forensic sur- gery. Fred is a schnook who hasn't a single swinging thing to yell at a cookout. Alison is a remorseless fun-girl, bored to bits with Fred.. They split. He tries to switch on with the go-go-go cats in the Village and at Torremolinos, and makes the foreseen discovery that this is the square world upturned. Meanwhile, back in parentsville, Alison is finding beneath the hypocrisy and dullness a dependable decency she had forgotten. How elusive is the obvious. Mr. Sheed touches every nuance with a wand of steely gaiety and illuminates it.
KENNETH ALLS(iP
Previous page
