All in the Family

AN ANTIQUE MAN by Merrill Joan Gerber. 278 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $4.95.

In literature nowadays, it is fashionable to joke raucously about death or use it as an existential symbol rather than write quietly and seriously about it. An Antique Man is an old-fashioned book. In this seemingly autobiographical first novel, the author solemnly chronicles the death of a nice man, cut down by cancer in his middle 50s. Unfortunately, the work falls considerably short of A Death in the Family, James Agee's classic in this genre.

Abram Goldman is a robust and endearing antique dealer with an imaginative zest for life. When he begins to suffer from leukemia, he is treated with the inevitable escalation of drugs, yet his condition deteriorates. His Jewish-mother-type wife and his daughters--one, the narrator, married with two daughters; the other, the novel's problem child, unmarried and with one foot in the Beat scene--observe his gallant but losing battle.

Such a tale is, of course, depressing. But Author Merrill Joan Gerber makes it even more so by coating it with sentimentality. A short-story writer who has published in Redbook and Mademoiselle, she seems glued to the traditional women's magazine faith--the world is blackest just before a rose-tinted dawn. After Abram's death, the problem sister marries her beatnik lover. The other sister decides that she will bear a son with her father's name--"It was all I could do in this world--all I could hope to do." Almost any death has a quantum of emotion, but because Author Gerber writes from a self-pitying, self-absorbed point of view, she grabs most of it for herself.

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