Fall Collection

THE TEMPTATION OF JACK ORKNEY AND OTHER STORIES

by DORIS LESSING

308 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

Doris Lessing's novels, rugged and sensibly made, move with great deliberation over some of the major issues of our time: the appeal of Marxism, technology, the loss of political and religious faith, and the struggle for personal freedom, especially women's. Yet the very qualities that make her a major novelist often work against her as a short-story writer. The potentially best stories in her new collection are charged with intelligence and feeling, but the form does not contain all that Doris Lessing seems to want to say.

A notable exception is the extraordinary 77-page title story, "The Temptation of Jack Orkney." Jack Orkney is a British journalist and author, a secular saint of the socialist old guard who could always be depended on to whip up a manifesto or organize a protest. At middle age, Orkney has survived ideological squalls with his honor intact. He and his wife enjoy a warm, understanding relationship. His daughters are grown and liberated; his son is a chip off the old radical bloc. But when Orkney is called north to the bedside of his dying father, he begins to have cold-sweat dreams of his own mortality.

When he returns to London, Orkney starts going to church. At the British Museum reading room he soaks up religious history, anthropology and Simone Weil. Friends call to see if he is all right. He is. His dreams have revealed the neglected half of his existence--the part that was always larger than his politics or his personal ego. His life jumps into sharp focus. He sees that his son is fated to learn all the old lessons as if they were new. He gets the truth about himself and his old-guard comrades just right. "Once they had forecast Utopias; now they forecast calamity, failed to prevent calamity, and then worked to minimize calamity."

Doris Lessing herself has gone the route from Marxist materialism to Sufi mysticism. The parallel with Orkney is quietly apparent. So is the meaning: that the beliefs one holds at various times are not always as important as the journey to and from them.

WITHOUT A STITCH IN TIME by Peter DeVries. 328 pages. Little, Brown. $8.95.

The beauty of a pun is in the oy of the beholder. Take Peter DeVries. "The things my wife keeps buying at auctions are keeping us baroque," he writes. And "Last night I dreamed of a female deer chasing a male deer in the mating season. . .a doe trying to make a fast buck."

Such wordploy is the mark of the DeVries oeuvre, at once its most noticeable--and least significant--characteristic. For between the punch lines, DeVries shows himself as a lapsed Calvinist who sees the world as a reproach to that incurable hypocrite, man. Irony is DeVries' weapon, and this collection of fugitive pieces extends his gallery of not always humane inconsistencies. When a worker obeys a "Think" sign, he is dismissed for woolgathering. An executive boasts of an affair he was strong enough to resist. But after his wife's resulting diatribe, he is furtively making plans for consummation. A youth fears that his girl friend is pregnant. Nightmares of a shotgun wedding haunt him for weeks--until she assures him, "Everything is all right." "I was free--free! I turned, seized her in my arms and, in an ecstasy of gratitude, asked her to marry me."

Threaded through such stories is a mixed garland of parodies, including Faulkner (Requiem for a Noun), Elizabeth Bowen ("Tennyson, Anyone?") and Ring Lardner, who is sent up in the guise of a Little League manager writing home in You Know Me, Alice.

ARIGATO by Richard Condon. 312 pages. Dial Press. $7.95.

Fastidious distaste for fellow human beings is no hindrance to headwaiters and lighthouse keepers. It can be a positive asset for a man in the comic-novel industry. But Richard Condon, whose extraordinary talent for comedy produced The Manchurian Candidate, has developed this asset to the point of unproductive excess. In such recent novels as Mile High and The Vertical Smile he has simply refused to direct his attention toward anything that vaguely resembles a member of the human race.

The figures that populate his books are, instead, fantasmo embodiments of various sorts of foaming mania. Among the twitches ambulant in Arigato are compulsive gambling, saxophone playing, war games, gold lust, French cookery, banking, power-elitism and think-tankery. Fine, thinks the reader, that sounds lively, why not?

Well, why not is that Condon can't mention any character's irrelevant off-stage aunt without adding that she holds the world's record (2,164) for reading detective stories in a single year. The hero, a cashiered British navy captain, can't simply have a pretty French mistress with a thuggish father; she must be a Renoir nude and he the head of the Mafia in Marseilles. The captain's wife can't merely be rich and willful; she must run an investment program for the most powerful family in the U.S. and have as a father and uncles the men who control the CIA, the Treasury, the White House and most of the rest of the military-industrial complex.

Otherwise the story is a promising crime caper, involving the theft of millions of dollars worth of wine. Condon's throwaway lines have all their old weird wonder. Any one of the enormities he assigns to his characters at the rate of three a page would have fueled a complete farce. Jangling together they achieve only a certain frenzy, and give the odd impression of a man shouting desperately to avoid hearing something.

FROM THE LAND AND BACK by Curtis Stadtfeld. 202 pages. Scribners. $6.95.

We have heard a lot about the death of the family farm. This is a simple, luminous account of its life. Curtis Stadtfeld was born in 1935. He grew up on a 120-acre stock farm in central Michigan. It never was much of a farm. In fact it barely paid for itself, a typical farm in that respect as well as others. But it was nevertheless something increasingly rare in the modern world, a self-contained universe, scaled to the people who worked in it. In this rarity lay its value, one only now becoming plain to us.

To Stadtfeld, too. He has now put the farm behind him and is a college teacher. He is eloquent and trustworthy about such things as livestock ("Chickens and hogs are ultimately hostile to man") and soil (he memorably describes his father desperately trying to shatter rock-hard clay clods with a wooden mallet). Reading the book, one suspects that times were often bleaker than Stadtfeld remembers them, but he does stress, for the benefit of back-to-the-soil romantics, that "it is not in nature to support man very well."

A combination of new ideas and new machinery brought the farm life that Stadtfeld remembers to an end. Young men returning from the Second World War insisted on making changes--better farming methods, better equipment, even indoor plumbing. The result, in only a decade or two, was fewer and bigger farms. In short, agrobusiness. Much hard-to-farm land was simply abandoned. The Stadtfeld place, 100 years or so after being cleared, went back to scrub.

MARRIAGES AND INFIDELITIES Short stories by Joyce Carol Oates. 497 pages. Vanguard. $7.95.

With each new novel and collection of short stories it becomes less of an exaggeration to think of Joyce Carol Oates as the busiest coroner of the American soul. Indeed, the most macabre story (Happy Onion) in her latest collection ends with a dead rock star being peeled away on an autopsy table while his fiancee looks on. There are also stories featuring familiar Oates females choking on loneliness, crippled by their dependency on males or driven to madness and violence by the conflict between their roles and their desires. Occasionally one of these women asserts her will against the world and rises above her sisters. In The Sacred Marriage, the young widow of a famous poet abruptly falls in love with a scholar who has come to rummage through the great man's papers. She drops him just as abruptly for another academic trifle hound, explaining that her husband believed "that many things were possible in one lifetime. But you must force them to happen."

Miss Oates also finds inspiration in contemporary headlines. One story involves a young radical who tries to hijack a plane and is killed by an FBI sniper. There is even an exercise in the fantastic: a salesman takes to his bed and undergoes a metamorphosis, unspecified but definitely not human, and possibly not even animal.

The variety of style and technique displayed in these stories suggests that they were written as experiments. While few are very successful, it is the author's passionate willingness to attempt new forms for old obsessions that in the past has led her to write such fine novels as Expensive People and them.

LONG DIVISION by Anne Roiphe. 190 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

Anne Roiphe's last novel was Up the Sandbox, a blithe and cunning satire on the fine art of daydreaming, young-housewife division. Her new book is about a drive from Manhattan to Mexico by 35-year-old Emily Brimberg Johnson, a bitter woman in the process of divorcing the painter who walked out on her adoration. Their sullen daughter is a reluctant passenger.

The trouble is that half the cars on Western highways these days must have writers of one sort or other behind the wheel. There is getting to be rather a literary traffic tangle in which only the best drivers--Joan Didion on the Los Angeles freeways, Ross Macdonald in the canyons, Larry McMurtry on the asphalt-beribboned deserts--can make the trip worth it.

In fact if crafty old Nabokov had not written the first and best motel tour in Lolita, one might think that cityfolk like Mrs. Roiphe should stay off the road and leave the driving to the sons and daughters of the wide-open spaces. Long Division is a disappointing book by a talented writer. What it lacks is convincing physical settings or incidents to sustain the mournful interior monologues of the trapped and finally boring heroine. The author is energetic enough. She offers accounts of breakdowns and highway fatigue, as well as side trips to the Hershey chocolate factory, a Cherokee reservation and an old-people's settlement. Emily Brimberg Johnson passes many other promising, culturally depressed outposts, too, where the heavy irony is dutifully clanged but no echo sounds.

BARE RUINED CHOIRS: DOUBT, PROPHECY AND RELIGION by Garry Wills. 272 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

This is a trenchant collection of essays by one of the country's brightest and most thoughtful Roman Catholics about his beleaguered church. Unlike many intellectuals, Wills has not left the church during the current wave of disaffection, nor has he made any accommodation or adaptation to the Jesus movement. "Doubt is the test," he says. "Faith is rooted in it. The great enemy of believing is pretending to believe."

Still he is intensely critical of the church as institution and of almost all its tortured developments of the past 20 years. At the center of the book is a long essay on "the two Johns"--Pope John XXIII and President Kennedy. In these men, Wills argues, "liberals at last got the kind of leaders they thought would suffice, and found that this was not enough." Kennedy's concept of "flexible response" led to the most intractable of wars. The Second Vatican Council, initiated by Pope John, began by concentrating on liturgical reform but soon unleashed a flood of theological argument and, among laymen, disillusionment and doubt.

But Wills does not believe that the pre-conciliar church had the vitality to survive as it was much longer. His description of certain Catholic intellectuals of the '50s--with their enthusiasm for Merton and monasticism, Gregorian chant and the social encyclicals of the Popes--is witty but a bit condescending. As for the '60s, Teilhard de Chardin's cloudy, evolutionary mysticism gets no more praise than Pope John. Wills argues that both men did not fully see the consequences when they attempted to generalize or make programs from their private convictions.

To survive, Wills believes, the church must be "resurrected from the feet up." New forms of life have come from outside the hierarchy: "from Athanasius at local councils, Benedict in the monasteries, Francis of Assisi in the roads." Reformers of the past--from Savonarola to John Henry Newman--suffered or were silenced in their time but eventually prevailed. "It has always been the task of the prophetic church to redeem the kingly church," Wills concludes. "As Pope Innocent needed St. Francis, Paul VI needs Dan Berrigan."

BEHIND THE DOOR by Giorgio Bassani. 150 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $5.95.

How shrill and self-assertive the voices of most novelists sound after listening to Giorgio Bassani tell a story. The former editor of the literary magazine Botteghe Oscure and the discoverer of Giuseppe (The Leopard) Lampedusa, Bassani is best known in the U.S. for his lambent novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis from which the recent Vittoria De Sica film was made. Like Garden, this book is set in the author's native city of Ferrara during the 1930s. Also as in Garden, the narrator of Behind the Door is a wealthy, sensitive young Jew.

The boy is given no name. In the first year of liceo (roughly eleventh grade) he finds himself without his stolid lifelong best friend (who flunked the entrance exams), and caught between two new disturbing classmates. One is his proud seatmate Carlo Cattolica, whose "clarity of mind and profile, etched with a medal's sharpness" arouses the narrator's fascination and envy. The other is Luciano Pulga, a scruffy, pushy newcomer to the school "with a physique like a little wading bird's." Pulga is slavishly and successfully cultivated by the young Jew until Cattolica moves against them like a starfish bisecting a clam.

Bassani floats along after his young characters on their Majno bicycles, quietly following the street maps of their days. With unobtrusive skill, he delineates the delicate social patterns that emerge from shared seats and invitations to do homework together. The hierarchical distinctions in his small city are minute. Many of them are noted by the loquacious Pulga. On first viewing the narrator's graceful patrician house, the boy cries, "Twenty rooms! I can imagine what it must cost to heat them." So realistic a thought has never occurred to the narrator, who lives in an insulated world of private emotional speculation. When his classmates finally challenge him in a classic episode of adolescent testing, he finds to his sorrow that he cannot generate enough passion either to stand his ground or strike back.

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