The Grey Plague

LETTING Go (630 pp.)--Philip Roth--Random House ($5.95).

Perhaps writers should solve the second-book problem the way architects solve the 13th-floor problem. By skipping directly from first book to third, an author could avoid the mantraps invariably laid for the second: his own crippling desire to pile wonder upon wonder; and the phenomenon of suddenly small-hearted critics, eager to deflate what they can no longer discover. By the third book, of course, the writer has seen his limits, and forgiving critics are willing to let him develop at his own pace.

Now it is Philip Roth who faces the ordeal. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, published three years ago when he was 27, won him a National Book Award and justified acclaim as the best American short storyist to appear since Salinger. It was a sour, funny look at Jewish life in the U.S., and the only doubt critics had was whether an author capable of such superb genre-painting would ever trouble himself to attempt the bigger (and presumably more important) picture.

The new work is a bigger book, although not perhaps a bigger or better picture. Letting Go is a long, sober novel, mostly about the uncertainties of the university young (some Jewish, some gentile, none religious). Despite serious flaws, it is one of the better works of fiction published this year. The author's eye and ear have few equals, and on every page the reader knows that he is in the presence of a writer.

A Moral Flounderer. Gabe Wallach is the novel's hero and its most troublesome shortcoming. The son of a well-to-do New York dentist, Gabe is an intelligent, joyless, bored young man who is a scholar more by default than vocation. When the reader first sees him, he is a graduate student at the University of Iowa (his most irksome course is, naturally, Anglo-Saxon--a sly touch of the kind Roth is best at). There Gabe meets Paul and Libby Herz, a morose young couple living in a water-stained barracks apartment furnished chiefly with smudged paper--ungraded exams, piled paperbacks, Utrillo reproduction tacked to the wall. Their poverty is merely the standard lower academic kind, but the Herzes are more than usually miserable. He is Jewish, she was born Catholic, and their bitter parents cut off both love and loans when they married. Worse, Libby is a sickly girl, the sort whose pale beauty is best set off by fever, and whose malfunctioning organs--kidneys, in her case--take on a presence of their own in the house, like an old aunt's false teeth or an off-duty cop's revolver.

Gabe becomes obsessed with Libby.

Contemptuously, Paul Herz gives him a chance to attempt adultery. But Gabe is a moral sort of flounderer, and Libby seems inviolate in her weakness, the more so when Gabe learns that she had an abortion because she and Paul could not afford a baby.

Gabe and Libby kiss, once. But the misery lingers on, through a trifling affair Gabe has with a girl in Iowa and a serious romance with a divorcee in Chicago.

Probably because of Gabe's early benumbment by Libby, the second affair ends disastrously. Gabe quits teaching and wanders to Europe, dismayed at his spiritual paralysis and bitter, finally, at Libby and her twining weakness.

Flashes, Then Fog. The book ends, therefore, exactly where it began: with a gloomy young man who does not like himself or the world, and does not know why. The sole change in Gabe after 600 pages is that he realizes somewhat more clearly the fact (though not the explanation) of his malaise. Page by page, the novel is a rare pleasure to read; the author's strong, astringent style is always under sure control, and his ability to develop and sustain a characterization is astonishing. But there must be some failure of art when every character in the book is more clearly drawn, more comprehensible and more interesting than the hero--and when the hero grows muddier, not clearer, as the book progresses. In fact, Libby runs away with the book.

Perhaps Letting Go should have been her novel; certainly the narrative comes fully to life only when she is present.

But the major reason for the novel's uncertain mood is that it tries, unsuccessfully, to deal with the 20th century's grey plague--a paralysis of the apparatus that detects meaning in life. Greyness of spirit is what one writes about these days; fair enough. But the author's view of things must not be greyed. And in Letting Go, after a few fine satirical flashes at the beginning, Roth becomes bogged in solemnity whenever he tries to assess his dreary hero.

Letting Go must finally be counted a failure, although it is a failure of a quality few writers could achieve. Novelist Roth joins a select and puzzling company of young American writers--among them John Knowles (A Separate Peace}, whose second novel was disappointing, and John Updike, whose last few books have been second ones. Roth's similar floundering raises the question: Will the spreading greyness continue to muffle all the best new voices?

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