Books in Brief

Back to China, by Leslie A. Fiedler (Stein and Day, $4.95). Leslie Fiedler, Montanan professor and gamesome critic of American literary perversities, descends noisily in his second novel upon a number of familiar fictional communities, spraying DDT on everyone in sight: Radcliffe girls, beatniks and bureaucrats, American Indian hipsters, the editors of popular magazines, hypersensitive Jews, and anti-Semites. Mostly he seems to be annoyed by the shape certain novelists of the academic world and the Jewish sensibility are giving current fiction, and he puts a plague upon both their houses by recording a Bloomsday in the sad and sloppy life of Baro Finklestone, professor of philosophy in a university in the “ultimate West” (i.e., Montana). Finklestone is the graduate student’s dream, Ulysses as Outsider, Sterile Man, a searcher for both a father and a son, madly guilty about Hiroshima, Horatio Alger doing a stylized pratfall in slow motion. This clown selects as his putative father one Hiroshige, a civilized chap he met in China in 1945, a paradigm of Oriental calm who turns out to be a Japanese war criminal. And as his son, a grubby fugitive from an Indian reservation, addicted to peyote and the Allen Ginsberg Weltanschauung, who commits suicide partly because Finklestone is sleeping with his wife. On the day on which Fiedler observes him, Baro tries to come to terms with the inanity of his choices, and ends by returning to his own wife, who announces that she is going to have a baby of which he cannot possibly be the father (parthenogenesis? he wonders). The author busies himself so diligently answering his own criticism of other novelists point by point that the success of his hard-worked parody will depend on his reader’s knowledge of, and snappish contempt for, the kind of literature which his novel inverts and mocks. Fiedler, at any rate, appears quite certain that most of us are waiting for the end on his very own corner. r. bemis

Up the Down Staircase, by Bel Kaufman (Prentice-Hall, $4.95). It’s a crying shame this book isn’t that little bit better that makes all the difference. It has plenty of charm, keen insights, certain flashes of humor and lots of heart, but the author got tripped up by the format she chose for her first novel: the story of a young and idealistic English major—with an M.A. in Chaucer and a brand new New York State School Certificate—who takes a job in an average New York City high school. Mrs. Kaufman, herself a veteran of the New York City public school system, paints a vivid picture of the bureaucratic chaos her young teacher encounters: the nurse who is forbidden to nurse; the library from which books cannot be removed; the incessant demand for forms, questionnaires, reports, lateness slips, hallway passes, psychological evaluation, etc. She is somewhat less successful, however, in portraying the pathetic-to-intolerable pupils of Miss Barrett’s Home Room: we get The Negro, The Puerto Rican, The School Politician, The Sexy-Girl-Who-Gets-Pregnant and on down the line. But this could well be a byblow of the technical handicap Mrs. Kaufman set herself by choosing to tell her story entirely through: a) memoranda and notes circulated among the school personnel; b) samples of English essays; c) notes found in Miss Barrett’s Home Room Box; and d) letters by Sylvia Barrett to a married college friend. Every time the action starts to hop up and there is a quickening narrative thrust, it is brought to a standstill by the intrusion of a), b), c) or d). The third time around with the Suggestion Box was twice too many, at least for this reader.

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Back to China, by Leslie A. Fiedler (Stein and Day, $4.95). Leslie Fiedler, Montanan professor and gamesome critic of American literary perversities, descends noisily in his second novel upon a number of familiar fictional communities, spraying DDT on everyone in sight: Radcliffe girls, beatniks and bureaucrats, American Indian hipsters, the editors of popular magazines, hypersensitive Jews, and anti-Semites. Mostly he seems to be annoyed by the shape certain novelists of the academic world and the Jewish sensibility are giving current fiction, and he puts a plague upon both their houses by recording a Bloomsday in the sad and sloppy life of Baro Finklestone, professor of philosophy in a university in the “ultimate West” (i.e., Montana). Finklestone is the graduate student’s dream, Ulysses as Outsider, Sterile Man, a searcher for both a father and a son, madly guilty about Hiroshima, Horatio Alger doing a stylized pratfall in slow motion. This clown selects as his putative father one Hiroshige, a civilized chap he met in China in 1945, a paradigm of Oriental calm who turns out to be a Japanese war criminal. And as his son, a grubby fugitive from an Indian reservation, addicted to peyote and the Allen Ginsberg Weltanschauung, who commits suicide partly because Finklestone is sleeping with his wife. On the day on which Fiedler observes him, Baro tries to come to terms with the inanity of his choices, and ends by returning to his own wife, who announces that she is going to have a baby of which he cannot possibly be the father (parthenogenesis? he wonders). The author busies himself so diligently answering his own criticism of other novelists point by point that the success of his hard-worked parody will depend on his reader’s knowledge of, and snappish contempt for, the kind of literature which his novel inverts and mocks. Fiedler, at any rate, appears quite certain that most of us are waiting for the end on his very own corner. r. bemis

Up the Down Staircase, by Bel Kaufman (Prentice-Hall, $4.95). It’s a crying shame this book isn’t that little bit better that makes all the difference. It has plenty of charm, keen insights, certain flashes of humor and lots of heart, but the author got tripped up by the format she chose for her first novel: the story of a young and idealistic English major—with an M.A. in Chaucer and a brand new New York State School Certificate—who takes a job in an average New York City high school. Mrs. Kaufman, herself a veteran of the New York City public school system, paints a vivid picture of the bureaucratic chaos her young teacher encounters: the nurse who is forbidden to nurse; the library from which books cannot be removed; the incessant demand for forms, questionnaires, reports, lateness slips, hallway passes, psychological evaluation, etc. She is somewhat less successful, however, in portraying the pathetic-to-intolerable pupils of Miss Barrett’s Home Room: we get The Negro, The Puerto Rican, The School Politician, The Sexy-Girl-Who-Gets-Pregnant and on down the line. But this could well be a byblow of the technical handicap Mrs. Kaufman set herself by choosing to tell her story entirely through: a) memoranda and notes circulated among the school personnel; b) samples of English essays; c) notes found in Miss Barrett’s Home Room Box; and d) letters by Sylvia Barrett to a married college friend. Every time the action starts to hop up and there is a quickening narrative thrust, it is brought to a standstill by the intrusion of a), b), c) or d). The third time around with the Suggestion Box was twice too many, at least for this reader.