Shear Drama

THE PROMISE by Chaim Potok. 358 pages. Alfred Knopf. $6.95.

Several years ago a rather unlikely candidate rose like cream to the top of the fiction list. Rabbi Chaim Potok's first novel, The Chosen, never alluded to sex. It was a wholesome chronicle about the making of a rabbi, built around a single unforgettable baseball game between two Brooklyn Yeshivas. Though the telling was often crude, the tale itself was brief and poignant.

Much of the credit for the Cinderella publishing story goes to Robert Gottlieb, then the editorial genie in residence at Simon & Schuster, now the mavin at Alfred Knopf. Gottlieb not only touched the book with his fine promotional wand but trimmed it with his sharp office shears. The original manuscript ambled on for some 800 pages, carrying its two 15-year-old adolescent heroes, Reuven and Danny, into their post-college maturities. Gottlieb pared and pruned the first section, then offered it as a complete novel.

What Gottlieb did not do, alas, was retire the rest of the manuscript for good to a bottom drawer. A sizable chunk of it, apparently, is now being offered as The Promise. Whereas The Chosen's parochialism had built-in ventilating qualities, The Promise's provincialism is hothouse and stultifying. Unctuousness is mistaken for urgency. The plot resembles nothing less than a product of Rokeach--the kosher soap.

Breathless Climax. When we last left the two boys, the bespectacled Reuven had decided to become a rabbi and the earlocked Danny had opted for a career in psychology. In the current episode, Reuven befriends an iconoclastic Jewish scholar, Abraham Gordon, and his 14-year-old schizophrenic son Michael. For this, Reuven is threatened with the denial of his rabbinical ordination by a loyalty-oath-seeking Orthodox professor at his seminary. At the same time he invokes Danny's aid in the treatment of the schizophrenic. Danny prescribes a most unorthodox form of shock therapy for the boy: complete isolation. The climax of the novel involves the answering of the breathless questions: Will Reuven get his rabbinical degree? Will Danny be able to cure Michael after all?

But the real question, of course, is: how much more of the original manu script is still threatening us from Robert Gottlieb's drawer? "All beginnings are difficult," Potok quotes the midrash. Too true. For some writers, knowing when to stop is even more difficult.

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