Invisible Characters

The heron dances when he is in love, the dog frolics, the cat sings; the American, so the latest novels report, pouts. The sexual engagement, which used to figure in romances as the grand fling and picnic of love, is a grinding misery. And the romancer’s voice has become dull, trivial, bored. The heroines of these three novels are sullen and ill-natured; their heroes are vapid, mindless, and poor of vocabulary (two are said to be novelists, the third is a pretty doctor). One reads these lugubrious records of suburban boredom with the dry grins normally induced by descriptions of minor surgery, tacky gossip at church coffee hours, and the unregenerate conversation of a middle-income gaggle.

Let us understand right off that these prose imitations of TV hysteria are written in stultifyingly uninteresting words, in sentences of peristaltic regularity, no dictionary required in even the humblest den or kitchen. Mr. Loomis writes uniformly in unobtrusive clichés (“I’ve got to talk to you. It’s important—,” “The next morning, Verna woke up with a desire to talk to Ethel.”). Mrs. Baker does better by language, but not enough to suggest that tale-telling is an imaginative art.

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Guy Davenport

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The heron dances when he is in love, the dog frolics, the cat sings; the American, so the latest novels report, pouts. The sexual engagement, which used to figure in romances as the grand fling and picnic of love, is a grinding misery. And the romancer’s voice has become dull, trivial, bored. The heroines of these three novels are sullen and ill-natured; their heroes are vapid, mindless, and poor of vocabulary (two are said to be novelists, the third is a pretty doctor). One reads these lugubrious records of suburban boredom with the dry grins normally induced by descriptions of minor surgery, tacky gossip at church coffee hours, and the unregenerate conversation of a middle-income gaggle.

Let us understand right off that these prose imitations of TV hysteria are written in stultifyingly uninteresting words, in sentences of peristaltic regularity, no dictionary required in even the humblest den or kitchen. Mr. Loomis writes uniformly in unobtrusive clichés (“I’ve got to talk to you. It’s important—,” “The next morning, Verna woke up with a desire to talk to Ethel.”). Mrs. Baker does better by language, but not enough to suggest that tale-telling is an imaginative art.