Battleground

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

SAY GOODBYE TO SAM

by Michael J. Arlen

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 231 pages

$12.95

For many men, Oedipal conflict lasts long after they have resolved their feelings toward their mothers. Fathers and sons may skirmish for decades, matching physical prowess, social grace, perhaps sexual daring and, above all, worldly accomplishment. There is rarely a true reckoning; death and memory seem only to prolong the sense of contest. Sons of famous men find the scorekeeping particularly onerous: whatever the offspring's achievements, both generations are likely to suspect that the father's glory enhanced them. That psychic battleground is toured by Michael J. Arlen, 53, a journalist, memoirist and television critic of The New Yorker, yet seemingly fated to be known always as the son of the celebrated '20s novelist Michael Arlen (The Green Hat). Say Goodbye to Sam is told in the first person, and much of its detail is so close to Arlen's life that it is tempting to read the book as therapy or revenge. But it works, elegiacally and sometimes forcefully, as fiction.

Tom Avery, the narrator of the novel, has embarked upon a second marriage, to a younger woman. On the sort of momentary impulse that springs from a lifelong yearning, he decides to take her to New Mexico to meet his father, Sam Avery, a semiretired film director with a gift for popular appeal. The son has won critical success for his magazine articles and books (which Arlen slyly depicts as exhaustive looks at narrow topics, resembling less his own work than that of his New Yorker colleague John McPhee); he is too constrained, too inward looking, to write in a way that could stir emotions and reach a mass audience. Tom believes that his happiness and security with his new wife will shield him from his father's belittling ways. But in the course of an awkward, misbegotten summer holiday, the captivating old egotist outrides his son on horseback, humiliates him with the neighbors at the dinner table, even beguiles the young wife into joining excursions her husband will not. In his 40th year, Tom finds his father as big and awe inspiring as he did throughout childhood, when he waited in vain to be noticed.

Most of Tom's filial anxiety is expressed in petulant silences, terse complaints or brooding bedroom confidences to his wife. The dominant mood of the story is foreboding, not confrontation. Arlen enlarges the narrative with flashbacks, precise observations of the Southwestern landscape, persuasively detailed descriptions of scenes from Sam's imaginary film classics. He keeps the conflict from becoming one-sided by displaying Sam's abrupt charms and convincing manifestations of primitive genius: a ruthless urge to simplify, instantaneous judgment about character, a capacity for total absorption coupled with the short attention span of a child. Sam lives, with seeming entitlement, outside the rules.

The novel seems to be building toward a contemporary inversion of the Oedipus myth, in which the father would possess the son's bride. That impression is heightened by the best and perhaps most autobiographical scenes, as the narrator recalls a childhood of willful rudeness and neglect by his father, accompanied by pitiable flirtation from his mother. Yet just when Arlen, working through the accumulation of small, freighted moments, reaches an apparent climax, the ruminative and wistful tone turns frantic. In the culmination of a night of frenzied incident, the father is shot and gravely wounded by a romantic rival, and the aggrieved son abruptly turns prayerful. Arlen rescues the novel from pathos with the scene he seems to have had in mind all along: a recovering Sam and Tom talk of their differences only to reaffirm them. Not even a brush with violent death will bring the older man to guilt and confession, or the younger one to recognize that a child's claim on a parent may be something less than absolute. The dialogue, believable throughout the book, is at its best in this encounter. Speaking with rage and regret, Sam says to his son, "You still have hurty eyes."

Despite Arlen's grand theme, his book feels slight. He has turned to book-length fiction comparatively late in life; evidently it is not his natural form. Even so, Arlen has sound instincts about human nature: Tom is wholly believable in his fumbling attempts to launch a just-us-guys friendship with his father's latest collaborator; Sam's mistress Maria performs a convincing balancing act between servility and possession. Arlen's prose, if too painstakingly crafted, is at once taut and richly evocative. And in its glimpses of combat between father and son, it is fittingly remorseless. --By William A. Henry III