Special from No Man's Land

THE MANOR by Isaac Bashevis Singer. 442 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

Isaac Bashevis Singer is a most curious relic. He pecks away at his 22-year-old Yiddish typewriter, writing of dubious demons and Polish shtetls (Jewish villages) that disappeared before he was born. Is he, at 63, the greatest living 19th century novelist--author of titles as blatantly old-fashioned as The Family Moskat? Is he a Jewish Hawthorne? No labels quite cling to a writer who was too long regarded as just a quaint retailer of legends. -

Faced with this book, some readers might be dismayed by the thought of yet another Jewish novel. What with The Fixer by Malamud, The Chosen by Potok, and Fathers by Herbert Gold, not to mention a score of nonfiction books on Jewish themes recently, the public may well suspect a conspiracy to corner the literary market. But Singer is different and special. A deceptively frail, birdlike presence, he inhabits with iron realism a no man's land somewhere in the middle of a life of contradictions divided between 31 years spent in his native Poland and 32 years in his adopted home, New York City.

The son of a rabbi, he uses an obsolescent language; yet he has the spiritual restlessness, the wry embarrassment at heroics, the ashy taste for the absurd that are so typical of modern writers. At the same time, the difference between Singer and the Jewish-American authors is the distance between the first and the second generations. However brilliant they may be at times, their Jewish tradition and color have a borrowed air; Singer's are genuine. Their characters, at large in American life, suffer alienation; his characters, alone in their closed world, triumph over isolation.

Tragicomic Figure. The Manor, written between 1953 and 1955 but now appearing for the first time in English, could be the breakthrough book to gain Singer the wider audience he deserves. Like all of his fiction (The Magician of Lublin, Gimpel the Fool), this work is a subtle form of autobiography, projecting the author's own sense of exile. It embraces a quarter of a century of change in the life of a Jewish family near Warsaw in 1863. If the time and plot sound remote, the theme is not. The central character is a kind of petit bourgeois Job who has to endure the special ordeal also known to the modern family man: he is condemned to watch his children depart, with brutal casualness and indifference, from their upbringing.

Calman Jacoby begins as a simple, God-fearing small businessman. As a result of various political and social upheavals, he winds up an industrial entrepreneur. The children, as usual, go modern in their own ways. One of Calman's daughters commits the heresy of an interfaith marriage. A son-in-law, fascinated and undermined by science, moves toward that 20th century religion-substitute, psychiatry. The son-in-law's sister moves to the city and turns into a forerunner of the Career Girl.

A tragicomic figure, Calman looks at it all and blinks: "Who knew what the world was coming to?" The women smoke cigarettes, the men falsify accounts. Fear of God is replaced by fear of bureaucrats. The old fixed values are suddenly gone. At the end, Calman stops the world and gets off. He hides himself in a private makeshift synagogue--a mirage of an island in the sea of change.

Man Can Survive. Clearly, Singer feels an enormous sympathy for Calman, and just as clearly he sees that j Calman's gesture will not do. He feels an almost equal compassion for the children, and he sees that their various solutions will not do either. Like a true modern, Singer reserves the right to reject the past and dislike the present simultaneously. But he refuses to fall into fashionable despair. Below both hope and hopelessness, he reaches a bedrock conviction: men can survive all the new-old styles of frustration that they think up for themselves so ingeniously. Yes, he seems to say, change is king. And yes, life goes on, about as bad and as good and as endlessly fascinating as always. No other novelist today can balance this double truth so well.

The Prodigal Parents

THE SLOW NATIVES by Thea Astley. 223 pages. A/I. Evans. $4.95.

There is a convent near Brisbane, Australia, where the nuns serve visitors a specialty of their religious house: confiture of prickly pear. This exotic jam might well symbolize the theme of Thea Astley's novel, in which the harsh products of Australian soil undergo the painful process of civilization.

The scene is subtropical Brisbane, where a family of intellectual pioneers tests its illusions against a philistine, nononsense, somewhat raffish society. Once again Carol Kennicott (called here Iris Leverson) snoots Main Street and raises the banner of art (interior decoration) and sexual freedom (mild adultery with a neighbor). The author's feminine eye and ear for antipodean Babbittry and for significant styles in decor, clothes, deportment and accent make her a lively social satirist. But her book should not be mistaken for a mere gibe at the gaucheries of a raw culture. She is also dealing with the moral fate of a painfully recognizable family.

The Leversons are lapsed from religion and dutifully "progressive" in relation to their only son, 14-year-old Keith, who finds the natural conservatism of his age affronted by the necessity of calling his dim, tired father "Bernard." Keith's reaction is to rebel against the absence of authority. He becomes part surfie, part baby-faced Rimbaud, muttering tags of poetry and fragments of hip, and flirting with homosexuality. When he learns of his mother's adultery with the friendly neighborhood lecher, Rimbaud becomes Hamlet; he rages in silence against mother and his ghost of a father and takes to the road.

Keith is a study in adolescent nihilism until a twitch on the umbilical cord brings him home. Novelist Astley, a writer new to the U.S., dresses her old-fashioned pieties in mod prose. She is a fine craftsman and the best woman novelist to appear in Australia since Christina Stead. She will be all the better when she forswears some stylistic foibles, which appear to have been picked up from Australia's overmannered senior novelist, Patrick White.

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