The Futile and the Uncertain
The Wedding Band.
by Samuel Yellen.
Atheneum. 170 Pp. $3.75.
The Acrophile.
by Yoram Kaniuk. Translated by Zeva Shapiro.
Atheneum. 182 pp. $3.50.
Samuel Yellen’s The Wedding Band tells of an unhappy marriage. It is the sort of middle-class writing that tries to make barrenness palatable. Outwardly it descends from a vast collection of immigrant novels. The first person as narrator, the flashbacks, the anecdotal style, the homey detail are native to the genre. So is the realistic setting, here the poorer part of Cleveland during the first quarter of the century. But the theme of The Wedding Band underscores a depressing change in American conceptions of success. The nervy, independent hero-on-the-make is gone. (When he does appear, as in some of the novels of Saul Bellow, he is ill at ease, like a Trojan at a cocktail party.) The aspiring classes, who spawned him, are back in the living room, now called the family room. There they remain, figuratively putting up curtains, like Yellen’s narrator, Alexandra, college professor daughter of a Jewish papa and a Gentile mama. In household English she sings of the one adventure left to the unimaginative—a kind of dutiful voyeurism, an interest in intimate relations that is as self-righteous as it is self-conscious.
Despair breathes a little life into The Wedding Band. Apart from this genuine emotion, it is a mishmash of forced vigor, misplaced enthusiasm, and inadequate rationalization. Yellen’s description (and presentation) of husband and wife as alternate “cat and victim” tearing at each other’s entrails, is not softened by later talk of the virtues of endurance and “the flowers of man’s compassion and man’s charity.” The marital garden blooms instead with frustration, stupidity, and cruelty. This, says Alexandra, is “the human condition.” “‘What a piece of work is a man’” (sic) she chirps again, echoing Hamlet, but it is plain that she is chirping in the dark.
In an arena that has narrowed from the great world to the housing development, all men are equal and equally mean. Futility is the true subject of novels like The Wedding Band. To invoke Shakespeare in such a setting is grotesque. Humanism, once bright in American fiction, has paled here to a murky half-light through which can be discerned the hills and valleys of hell.
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It is possible to call The Wedding Band a Jewish novel but only because most of its characters are Jews. The Acrophile, an unusual first novel by Yoram Kaniuk, is less homogenized; it reads like a long Jewish joke. Kaniuk’s hero, Daan, fights for his soul in a modern, Kafka-esque swamp. His professional bounce, however, is legendary—it recalls the old struggle to stay alive in a world full of crazy goyim. Loss of moral control is a common latter-day bogey. Logically it must lead to a loss of identity. But in The Acrophile, logic is abandoned; Daan jumps like a jack rabbit from one uncertainty to another and is rescued at last, good-naturedly, by the author.
The novel was written originally in Hebrew. Zeva Shapiro’s English translation is strong, sensitive, and clever. Kaniuk, like his protagonist, is a young Israeli living in New York. His plaintive tale is told in piping prose that is as much at ease as its hero is not. It beweeps his outcast state and at the same time fairly sings with a natural delight in life: “Opening the window, what was left for me but to string myself on the laundry line extending above this uncourtly court-yard, and crow like a hapless rooster cock-a-doodle-doo to the lord of the universe who has forgotten my name?” The paradox is traditional in Jewish humor.
The Acrophile makes moral judgments on several levels at once. “Acrophile,” a coined word, means lover of heights. Daan, who took part in a bloody incident in Israel, longs to rise above his sense of sin. He divorces the human race and becomes a child symbolically. His egotism is like the animism of childhood which assumes that the universe is an extension of the self. Plants and objects have consciousness: “yellow leaves . . . that would have liked to cry out my joy.” In psychoanalytical terms, he reverts to childishness to escape the consequences of his crime; his odd behavior seeks from society the punishment that promises absolution. On the other hand, his step down from maturity, as it is understood by most people, may be seen as a step up toward God and a closer alliance with the natural order.
A third view links The Acrophile to the literature of absurdity. Daan appears as the last sane man in a world gone mad. Reasoned authority has decamped, like his Israeli officer, “leaving no address.” Scenery and events are blurred so that it becomes as difficult to separate the real from the unreal as it is to distinguish between good and evil. The recurrent suspension of reality, the progression of fantastic incidents, emphasize a subtler lunacy in personal relations and social institutions. In this context, disengagement is the alternative to sickness.
The remaining possibility is that madness is relative. This seems to be Kaniuk’s point. “God looks out from the other side of every road,” he declares; choice is endless. Daan becomes a guide on top of the Empire State Building, a position worthy of Holden Caul-field. He has made no important decisions, but they have been made for him in the accidents of day-to-day existence. By recognizing his right to live, he earns the right to live as he pleases.
Unfortunately, the novel lacks unity. The roads to God must have seemed so many that the author did not know which to take. Many threads of story and thought are lost, little is resolved. But, at the same time, variety is the virtue of the book. The narrative sails off on a sea of imaginative opportunity—and humor, much of the time, keeps it afloat. This is interesting because humor is also the restraining element that makes The Acrophile a conventional novel. Kaniuk flirts with fantasy, with abnormality, with expressionism, with illusion; humor brings him to common sense again and again. This is not to disparage his obvious talent. He does what many avant-garde writers cannot seem to do: he explores, or begins to explore, unreality while retaining a sense of the fitness of things. Perhaps his next novel will weld more securely together the two subjects, life and dreams, so that they act as a single entity, moving toward a recognizable end.
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