The First Novelists: Skilled, Satirical, Searching

Question: What do a child-guidance counselor, a jazz pianist, a BBC newscaster, a Peruvian living in Paris, a 26-year-old beauty from North Carolina and a 63-year-old real estate millionaire from Manhattan have in common? Answer: All are aspiring authors who have swelled one of the longest and strongest lists of first novels ever published in a single season.

Traditionally, the first novelist bursts upon the literary scene like a day-old volcano--exploding platitudes, scattering an unbreathable ash of adjectives, devouring cash advances like sacrificial maidens. The noisy thing may turn out to be a mountain or a molehill, but on the chance of producing a verbal Vesuvius most publishers annually sponsor a series of these fictional eruptions, timing them to coincide with the great silence that descends on the book business between July 4 and Labor Day.

This midsummer, 27 first novels are coming out. The list does not include another Remembrance of Things Past or even a Gone With the Wind--speaking of first novels--but it does present more than a dozen books of rippling readability, and several that promise to become bestsellers. Above all, it introduces four new novelists--Robert Crichton, James Mossman, Cynthia Ozick, Sylvia Wilkinson--whose literary skill and temperamental resonance argue remarkable things to come.

The books have strong qualities in common, and some of the qualities are deplorable. Sick sex and vicious violence recur with obsessive frequency, and so do a number of Eng. Lit. leftovers; several of the new novelists describe clouds that look "like grey wool." At least half of them, however, make nervy experiments in fictional form, and almost all show the kind of ultimate concern with human beings that is no less religious because it calls itself existential. In almost every instance, the writers courageously explore the shape of a new fiction in form and spirit adequate to the age.

In the first novels from abroad, the explorations are cautious but skillful. The Time of the Hero (Grove Press) by Mario Vargas Llosa, 28, a Paris-based Peruvian, is a social satire so harrowingly powerful that 1,000 copies were publicly burned in Lima. Vargas sets up the national military academy, which he attended, as a metaphor of his homeland, and in reciting what he sees as the horrors of life at school suggests what he thinks of life in Peru. More sophisticated is The Opoponax (Simon & Schuster) by France's lissome Monique Wittig, 31. A disciple of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the French fanatic whose "objective" novels systematically reduce people to objects, Author Wittig has composed a synoptical illusion that describes how a little girl grows up by assembling on the page a collage of things she did--not a word about the things she thought or felt. French critics have called the book a masterpiece, and by Robbe-Grillet's rather special standards they are not far wrong.

The new British novelists, though seldom adventurous in form, are insistently complex in content. In The Seahorse (Atheneum) by Anthony Masters, 24, progressive education in England gets a gruesome going-over. Masters' headmaster participates in creative play with his assistant's wife, the kiddies express themselves by plotting blackmail and even murder, and a member of the staff releases inhibitions by decapitating cats. Masters too often manufactures sensations instead of making sense, but he can summon remarkable talents for projecting character and transmitting an atmosphere of educational gothic.

The best first novel out of Britain is Beggars on Horseback (Atlantic-Little, Brown) by James Mossman, 39. A tall, blond and handsome TV personality who was once a British foreign-service staffer, Mossman has written a satire on colonial debacle that is almost as savagely hilarious as Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief. Mossman sets his scene in a mythical Middle Eastern kingdom on which the British are losing their traditional grip. The incumbent king is a corpulent pederast who splashes in a gold-plated bathtub while his people eat mice and provide entertainment for the sadistic secret police. His army and his oilfields are controlled by the British, but the British legate is a bumfembedded charge, and his aides are tired old faggots and redbrick rejects. The Russians infiltrate, the colonels plot, the inevitable coup transpires in a scarlet smear of violence. The story falters in its final pages, but Mossman never relents his graceful ridicule ("The Russian delegation in their square-rigged tunics and striped trousers arrived at the palace, looking like a band that has lost its instruments"). Nor does he abate his unseemly aptitude for discovering bacteria in the milk of human kindness.

Mossman excepted, the most talented first novelists are American. About half of them are trying hard to write a new kind of fiction: the Pop Novel. Most of them acknowledge their debt to J. D. Salinger, Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon, but they ultimately derive the strength through Joyce--their narrative source is the scream of consciousness.

The new pop novelists write mostly in the first person, and that person speaks comic-strip American: jive jabber, Al Capptions, sportsese. What he says is ironic, defensive, cool, often comical. In all of these novels, the tone of the talk matters more than the shape of the plot. The new pops derive from the traditional novel of sensibility, but their sensibility is fresh and American. Their anti-heroes are the self and abstract of the lonely crowd, the Jonah wandering lost in the modern Leviathan.

Big Man (Houghton Mifflin) by Jay Neugeboren, 28, an English instructor at Columbia, finds its anti-hero in black Brooklyn, but race is not his reason for being on the outside looking in. Mack Davis is a onetime All-America basketball star who got caught fixing games for the gamblers. Kicked off the court, Mack takes a job in a car wash ("I got the cleanest hands of any fixer around") and wears his cool like a man who couldn't care less. But he's crying on the inside, warming a cold old hope of playing with the pros. What happens to his hope is fast, funny, touching and, as Mack's life dribbles aimlessly toward a goal it will never make, profound. With a sort of sneaky reverse-layup poetry, Neugeboren illuminates one of the great and terrible questions of life: "What happens when you can't do the thing you love?"

New Axis (Houghton Mifflin) by Charles Newman, 28, an English professor at Northwestern, finds its anti-hero in suburbia--Newman passed his adolescence in a wealthy Chicago suburb. Little Ed, the son of Big Ed, grows up in the world of picture windows and miniature tractors to become successively a tackle on the Country Day School football team, a lifeguard at the country club, an M.D. with a prosperous practice, the father of Little Little Ed--and a man who sometimes wonders sadly if he will really find salvation through his hobby: hand-hewing baseball bats. Author Newman's sentences are almost too elegant; his suburban lanes go "wandering, gutterless, glistening in heat or rain, taking gasping names--forged Indian, appropriated Anglo-Saxon, elated misnomers." His satire, however, is subtle and precise, as when he sums up his hero in one exquisitely sly little slide-away line: "I never had a chance to be a stranger myself."

Norwood (Simon & Schuster) by Charles Portis, 32, a journalist who was briefly a New York Herald Tribune correspondent in London, finds its anti-hero in Arkansas. Norwood Pratt, an ex-marine who runs a Nipper Independent Oil Co. Servicenter, gets sick and tired of living with his sister Vernell and her husband Bill, a disabled veteran who refuses to go halvers on the weekly food bill and leaves "hairs stuck around on the soap." Norwood makes a deal with Grady Fring the Kredit King to drive an Olds 98 to New York, expenses paid and $50 clear. Fortified by a bottle of NuGrape and a nickel pack of Nabs, he sets out on a jocular junket that confronts him with the second shortest midget in show business, a hypnotized chicken, his future wife, and a climactic offer of employment as "night man at the worm ranch." If this is vaudeville, it is vaudeville with a vengeance. In a dry, wry Arkansas accent, Portis gently tells the home truth about the Norwoods of the world whose lives are one long journey to nowhere.

As for The Steagle (Random House) by Irvin Faust, 42, a Long Island child-guidance counselor, let the reader beware: this pop novel pops so violently that it cannot safely be perused without welding goggles. It tells the story of a man in whom two personalities merge--as pro football's Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles once merged into "The Steagles." The man is Harold Aaron ("Heshy") Weissburg, a nice Jewish intellectual who lives with his nice wife and their two nice children until--CHOONG! The Cuban missile crisis blows up his complacency and releases his alter ego: an unquiet Quixote who jumps on the nearest jet and goes whooshing across the U.S. in search of his true identity. Like Bloom in darkling Dublin, like Mitty in the mazes of Waterbury, Conn., he dissolves into fantasies elaborated to suggest simultaneously a madness in himself and in America. Headlines, brand names, movie stars, sports heroes, billboards, road signs, dirty jokes--they whirl in his head like garbage in a Disposall. And what's there when Faust flips the chopper off? An almighty typographical mux that is often confusing but amusing.

Two of the cleverest pop novels suggest subdivisions of the genre. The Piano Sport (Atheneum) by Don Asher, 40, might be called a bop novel. Written by a man who plays funky piano at the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, the book tells a sprightly story about a cat who plays piano somewhere else in town. Call the Keeper (Viking) by Nat Hentoff, 41, a man-about-Manhattan who writes voluminously about jazz, race and Greenwich Village, is an ingenious pop thriller about jazz, race and Greenwich Village. The main menace is a Negro intellectual who hangs out with jazzbos and cuts up his victim on Bleecker Street.

Happily for literature, not all the new U.S. novelists are attempting to renovate the novel. Many make admirable use of the established forms. Appearance of a Man (Random House) by George Backer, 63, an ex-publisher of the New York Post who inherited a real estate fortune and has served as a political adviser to Averell Harriman, elucidates the psychology of power in an intelligent tale about a character admittedly modeled on the late James Forrestal. All the Little Heroes (Bobbs-Merrill) by Herbert Wilner, 40, describes with tender humor and felicity how in the last ten days of his life a dying man learns how to live. This Blessed Shore (Shorecrest) by Thomas B. Morgan, 39, recounts with rage and considerable skill how another dying man (the author's father) suffered terminal agonies that in Morgan's opinion required the exercise of euthanasia.

The season's three most flagrantly gifted first novels are conventional in plot and structure, but exuberantly original in feeling and character.

Moss on the North Side (Houghton Mifflin) by Sylvia Wilkinson, 26, a green-eyed elf from the tobacco country of North Carolina, is a lyric evocation of childhood by one of the most talented Southern bellettrists to appear since Carson McCullers. Begun when the author was 13 and rewritten intermittently for more than a decade, Moss transpires in the mind and immediate vicinity of a white-trash waif. The girl's mother, a cold-eyed prostitute, abandons her, and her father, a warm-hearted Cherokee Indian, dies of rabbit fever. Desperate, she seeks in nature the tenderness she needs, and imagines the lost meaning of her life in bizarre epiphanies: a glimpse of flowers growing in a dead mule, an encounter with an albino Negro boy who "ain't got biddie brains in his head."

In the variegated nosegay of American letters, the Deep South's poetry of decadence stinks like a long-since-wilted magnolia, but Author Wilkinson magically refreshes its fragrance with images new as dew: "A green snake weaved around the rocks, rolling like a liquid in hot glass until the grass pulled it in and it disappeared." Language like that explains why the late Randall Jarrell described Miss Wilkinson as "the most talented writer of prose I ever taught."

The Secret of Santo Vittoria (Simon & Schuster) by Robert Crichton, 41, a World War II combat veteran, is very likely the funniest war novel since Mister Roberts. The Troy of his hilarious Iliad is a wine-producing village in southern Italy, a town so poor in everything, including fertilizer, that its inhabitants stalk oxen with a broom and a pan. The Hector of the tale is the village mayor, a paisano whose native cunning has been reinforced by the study of Machiavelli. The Agamemnon of the story is a German captain assigned to rob the village of its only precious possession: 1,320,000 bottles of vermouth.

Kesselring himself could hardly have prevailed against a populace so shifty that when a man quarrels with his neighbor he adds injury to insult by letting his donkey eat the neighbor's grass. In the belly-busting climax of this humoric epic, the Germans ignominiously wrest defeat from the jaws of victory, and the villagers preserve their vino for the postwar American market. Crichton tells his story with grace, pace, warmth and a wonderful free-reeling wit that skips among the vineyards like an inebriated billygoat. The book should make a dandy movie.

Trust (New American Library) by Cynthia Ozick, 38, a housewife in New York's suburban Westchester County, is the most ambitious of the new first novels, a boardinghouse stab at greatness that should at least bring back some fame on the fork. Author Ozick is an intense mouse (5 ft. 2 in.) who has brought forth, after 6 1/2 years of gestation, an elephant of a book (568 pages) that reconstructs a central experience of American Jewry in the troubled '30s: the religion of social justice that accepted Marx as its messiah. The radicals in this book are mostly of the wealthier sort, and their proletarian opulence permits innumerable ironies of contrast between the things they believe and the things they do. The author's sense of structure and her grasp of character are at best almost Tolstoyan. Her dialogue is a persistent delight, and her prose at intervals attains a Jamesian sonority. A random sentence: "My father's letters, infrequent as they were, always brought their own oppressive season into our house, suggestive of a too-suddenly fruitful thicket, lush, damp, growing too fast, dappled with a tremolo of a million licking hairs--deep, sick, tropical." More assuredly than any other first novelist published this summer, she imparts an impression of power and control, and of larger worlds still waiting to be born.

One novel does not make a novelist, and an armful of good ones do not make a literature. Yet the appearance of so many gifted novelists in a single summer may at least encourage those lugubrious critics who perennially rewrite the obituary of the novel to go scare up free lunch at some other wake.

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