Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma Review Author(s): Marvin J. LaHood Review by: Marvin J. LaHood Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 67, No. 1, Russian Literature at a Crossroads (Winter, 1993) , p. 181 Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40148944 Accessed: 19-11-2015 12:25 UTC
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ENGLISH Fiction William Kennedy. VeryOld Bones. New York. Viking. 1992. vi + 292 pages. $22. WilliamKennedyhas createda worldaroundAlbany, New York. One piece of it, Ironweed(1983), earned him a Pulitzer Prize. VeryOld Bonesis a complex and masterfuladditionto that world. Its main action is set in 1958,but it rangesbackwardall the way to 1887 in order to createa Phelanfamilyhistoryfull of love and hate,joy and depression,spiritualityand sensuality,triumph and defeat. Kennedyis haunted by familialpasts, and he writes,as Peter Phelan paints in this novel, because both understand that "even in aspiration, art is a way of gaining some measure of control over life." The psychic center of the novel is Peter's "son," Orson Purcell, a brilliant but sometimesdisturbed student of life whose narrative style is as mesmerizing as Kennedy could have imagined. The long and complex story is Orson'sattempt to understand the Phelan clan: his "father" Peter, who paints his way through two histories, that of his oldest brother Francis- "who pursued his own direction freely, even if it led to the gutter and the grave"- and that of a lost, violent Albanyancestor, MalachiMcllhenny. Other Phelans are also prominent: Peter's mother Kathryn, a cold, pious, self-righteous woman who "didn'treallyknow nothin' about how to live";his sisters Sarah,frozen in her mother'simage, unable to love, and Molly, the opposite, a lover in every sense; and a retarded brother, Tommy, who lives and dies tragically. Orson'slife is complicatedby his love affairwith and marriage to a stunningly beautiful woman, Giselle Marais. As he fights his way from bastardy to legitimacy, Orson becomes the seer who is able to put the Phelan familyhistoryinto the perspectiveof wisdom and order, in the process doing for himself what he ascribes to Peter: pursuing "freedom from cheap illusion and untrustworthy instincts by trying for a lifetime to find magic in what was real in the world and in his heart, ultimatelyreaching a depth of the self that others rarely achieve." VeryOldBonesis testimony that WilliamKennedy has done the same. Marvin J. LaHood SUNY College, Buffalo
David Lodge. ParadiseNews. New York. Viking. 1992 (© 1991). xx + 294 pages. $21. As in a number of his earlier novels, David Lodge in ParadiseNews is both very funny and serious- in that order. Funny, in that his treatment of a group of British tourists who disembarkfor a vacationin Hawaii after a long and exhausting flight from Heathrow often
verges on the wildly hilarious;but also serious, in that his centralcharacter,BernardWalsh,who teaches theology in England- having earlier abandoned the priesthood and the Church along with his faith- has now to cope with dilemmas in commercialized Honolulu that turn out to be as ethically important as they are incongruous. If David Lodge is serious about his work, however, a question remains about his method. Granted that he is steadily inventive, can he balance serious ideas against humor that can move from dazzling to slapstickwithout having his work sometimes slip over into the merely facile? Typically, he grounds things on a well-plotted story line with details that are accurate. Thus, his random crowd of Britishtouristshave very specificreasons, ranging from the silly to the reasonable,for taking this two-weekpackage tour to Paradise.Sue and Dee are in their early thirties and looking for a husband, "Mr. Right," for Dee, as they have done on earlier trips to Athens, Florida, Crete, and other such spots. Brian Everthorpe and his wife are on their second honeymoon, middle-agedand determined to enjoy themselves and to record the whole thing on videotape. Cecily and Russ are on their first honeymoon, but the bride isn't speakingto her husband. Sheldrakeis an anthropologist who has built a successful academic career out of explaining how organized travel can be considered as the modern equivalentof the medieval pilgrimage- visits to scenic spots instead of holy shrines. He makes lists of things: ParadiseMotel, ParadiseBakery,ParadiseLaundromat, ParadiseNews- the latter with information for tourists. BarnardWalshhas the real problem, however, in that his father, who didn't want to come on this trip anyway - a thoroughly irascibleman and a believer, as Bernard is not- ends up in the hospital with a fractured pelvis instead of paying a long-delayedvisit to his sister Ursala, who is dying of cancer. The elderly man had looked the wrong way in stepping off the curb and been struckby a car driven by Yolanda, a middle-aged Hawaiianwoman who will become first a friend an then a bit more than that to Bernard,instructinghim in the delights of physical intimacy and then love, as at other times she questions him about details of the Catholicfaith in which he no longer believes. This latter provides Lodge the opportunityto develop his main concern:the dilemma of the honest skepticin a secularage who tries to face up to everydaylife but who cannot quite let go of the big questions. Lodge has Bernard rely at first on the Penny Catechism for his answers to Yolanda, but finally Bernard will bring in ideas from Swedenborg, Barth, Bultman, Tillich, and Bonhoffer in his attempt to justify to this woman a secularizedtheodicy in a world contingent and shorn of purpose, where God has been demystifiedinto an indefinite presence, and Hell and Heaven (i.e., Paradise) mostly dispensed with. And here is where Lodge'smethod, though ingenious, runs some risk. He speaks as the omniscient narratorwith frequent side excursions (usu-
This content downloaded from 129.115.103.99 on Thu, 19 Nov 2015 12:25:11 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to World Literature Today.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 129.115.103.99 on Thu, 19 Nov 2015 12:25:11 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ENGLISH Fiction William Kennedy. VeryOld Bones. New York. Viking. 1992. vi + 292 pages. $22. WilliamKennedyhas createda worldaroundAlbany, New York. One piece of it, Ironweed(1983), earned him a Pulitzer Prize. VeryOld Bonesis a complex and masterfuladditionto that world. Its main action is set in 1958,but it rangesbackwardall the way to 1887 in order to createa Phelanfamilyhistoryfull of love and hate,joy and depression,spiritualityand sensuality,triumph and defeat. Kennedyis haunted by familialpasts, and he writes,as Peter Phelan paints in this novel, because both understand that "even in aspiration, art is a way of gaining some measure of control over life." The psychic center of the novel is Peter's "son," Orson Purcell, a brilliant but sometimesdisturbed student of life whose narrative style is as mesmerizing as Kennedy could have imagined. The long and complex story is Orson'sattempt to understand the Phelan clan: his "father" Peter, who paints his way through two histories, that of his oldest brother Francis- "who pursued his own direction freely, even if it led to the gutter and the grave"- and that of a lost, violent Albanyancestor, MalachiMcllhenny. Other Phelans are also prominent: Peter's mother Kathryn, a cold, pious, self-righteous woman who "didn'treallyknow nothin' about how to live";his sisters Sarah,frozen in her mother'simage, unable to love, and Molly, the opposite, a lover in every sense; and a retarded brother, Tommy, who lives and dies tragically. Orson'slife is complicatedby his love affairwith and marriage to a stunningly beautiful woman, Giselle Marais. As he fights his way from bastardy to legitimacy, Orson becomes the seer who is able to put the Phelan familyhistoryinto the perspectiveof wisdom and order, in the process doing for himself what he ascribes to Peter: pursuing "freedom from cheap illusion and untrustworthy instincts by trying for a lifetime to find magic in what was real in the world and in his heart, ultimatelyreaching a depth of the self that others rarely achieve." VeryOldBonesis testimony that WilliamKennedy has done the same. Marvin J. LaHood SUNY College, Buffalo
David Lodge. ParadiseNews. New York. Viking. 1992 (© 1991). xx + 294 pages. $21. As in a number of his earlier novels, David Lodge in ParadiseNews is both very funny and serious- in that order. Funny, in that his treatment of a group of British tourists who disembarkfor a vacationin Hawaii after a long and exhausting flight from Heathrow often
verges on the wildly hilarious;but also serious, in that his centralcharacter,BernardWalsh,who teaches theology in England- having earlier abandoned the priesthood and the Church along with his faith- has now to cope with dilemmas in commercialized Honolulu that turn out to be as ethically important as they are incongruous. If David Lodge is serious about his work, however, a question remains about his method. Granted that he is steadily inventive, can he balance serious ideas against humor that can move from dazzling to slapstickwithout having his work sometimes slip over into the merely facile? Typically, he grounds things on a well-plotted story line with details that are accurate. Thus, his random crowd of Britishtouristshave very specificreasons, ranging from the silly to the reasonable,for taking this two-weekpackage tour to Paradise.Sue and Dee are in their early thirties and looking for a husband, "Mr. Right," for Dee, as they have done on earlier trips to Athens, Florida, Crete, and other such spots. Brian Everthorpe and his wife are on their second honeymoon, middle-agedand determined to enjoy themselves and to record the whole thing on videotape. Cecily and Russ are on their first honeymoon, but the bride isn't speakingto her husband. Sheldrakeis an anthropologist who has built a successful academic career out of explaining how organized travel can be considered as the modern equivalentof the medieval pilgrimage- visits to scenic spots instead of holy shrines. He makes lists of things: ParadiseMotel, ParadiseBakery,ParadiseLaundromat, ParadiseNews- the latter with information for tourists. BarnardWalshhas the real problem, however, in that his father, who didn't want to come on this trip anyway - a thoroughly irascibleman and a believer, as Bernard is not- ends up in the hospital with a fractured pelvis instead of paying a long-delayedvisit to his sister Ursala, who is dying of cancer. The elderly man had looked the wrong way in stepping off the curb and been struckby a car driven by Yolanda, a middle-aged Hawaiianwoman who will become first a friend an then a bit more than that to Bernard,instructinghim in the delights of physical intimacy and then love, as at other times she questions him about details of the Catholicfaith in which he no longer believes. This latter provides Lodge the opportunityto develop his main concern:the dilemma of the honest skepticin a secularage who tries to face up to everydaylife but who cannot quite let go of the big questions. Lodge has Bernard rely at first on the Penny Catechism for his answers to Yolanda, but finally Bernard will bring in ideas from Swedenborg, Barth, Bultman, Tillich, and Bonhoffer in his attempt to justify to this woman a secularizedtheodicy in a world contingent and shorn of purpose, where God has been demystifiedinto an indefinite presence, and Hell and Heaven (i.e., Paradise) mostly dispensed with. And here is where Lodge'smethod, though ingenious, runs some risk. He speaks as the omniscient narratorwith frequent side excursions (usu-
This content downloaded from 129.115.103.99 on Thu, 19 Nov 2015 12:25:11 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
