Fort Lauderdale News from Fort Lauderdale, Florida • 133

Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel, Sunday, February 14, 1971 7H Generation Of New Left WORLD BERRY'S Wylie Still Hits Solar Plexus ft 1 i SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF MOM by Philip Wylie. Doubleday. 227 pp. $5.95 THE ONLY THING worse than being prophet corned ii being prophet ignored. Thirty years ago Philip Wylie brought down on his head a nation's wrath for his attacks on America's manners and mores and more particularly, on American mothers for raising their children "by tyranny or bribery." Momism has been a pejorative term ever since.

Meantime those "sons and daughters of Mom" have grown up and begun a would-be revolution of their own. Now Wylie finds himself in the unhappy situation of watching the ball he once carried being carried by a generation which hardly knows his name. Hence this new book, in which Wylie reminds not only the young but their parents as well of his past role as a whip and scourge of American society. Like all of his social commentaries, it is scathing, indignant, immoderate, but shot through with occasional insights. I confess I find something faintly absurd in the spectacle of a writer now approaching seventy trying to out-shout the young rebels.

Philip Wylie today is not the Philip Wylie who ex- coriated Moms a generation ago. At the same time it must be conceded mat the over-permissiveness of parents has played no small part in shaping the affluent campus rebels who want to remake America and the world for that matter. As Wylie correctly notes, they offer no effective substitute for the Establishment they profess to abhor. "The New Left, SDS, activist gaggle holds false positions self-righteously. They are, psychologically, but a mirror-image of loathed parents and hated adults." In fact, he adds, neither generation parents or children has "values worth a damn.

Neither one can think, neither has the education essential for any appropriate reform of our society and nation." And, just to. remind us that he is still the same Philip Wylie, "Momism is a domestic form of totalitarianism." The language, you will observe, is still the familiar Wylie solar-plexus prose, with which he now takes aim at targets from intellectual liberals to women's lib, from racism to education, from the drug subculture to cop-out, dropout kids. Some of it reads like a carryover from the Wylie of the Forties and hence is barely relevant today. But when he speaks as one of the parent (or grandparent) generation denouncing the youthful advocates of hair-power he makes a good deal of sense. "The New Left," he declares in one passage, "has no answers.

They find it not necessary to know how to right a wrong simply because they've pointed it out as such. Cop-out is ineffective. The critic who makes his statement and then walks away is a coward." No one can accuse Wylie of walking away. His book is one long bill of particulars in a indictment of the way to live, accompanied by some cloudy suggestions as to what we should do to achieve our true "identity" and a proper relationship with nature. The easier part of all this is that which relates to the youth revolution.

Based largely on inflated expectation, fevered rhetoric, misunderstood ideology and primitive mythology, it is now entering its twilight phase, not because of adult, suppression but because of sheer boredom. But as to the larger question Wylie raises the proposal that we abandon theological faith and relate to nature that lies far in the future, if indeed it is ever accomplished at all. AUTHOR PHILIP WYLIE in a shouting match Wl bj NEA, he. Critic Finds Cold War On Moon Too Far Out "Yelt, that's progress! We changed the office dress regulations tor pantsuits now, we'll hare to face-up to 'Hot Pants'." HE THRONE OF SATURN by Allen Drury. Doubleday.

588 pp. $7.95 Writer Shows Rare Knack In His Book Of Essays Ww if! New Books At Qty Library Uyr J) 1 rV jVTONE OF Allen Drury's novels has matched the success of his first, "Advise ind Consent," and if you have read them Consistently (as I have) the reasons are fair-jr obvious. To begin with, Drury is really a reporter, and reporters rarely make good novelists. (Yes, I know there have been excep-twis, but Drury is- not one of them.) Their fct-oriented approach inhibits the imagina-tm. Once the novelty of "Advise and Consent" hi worn off, we began to notice the stock dracterization and stagey dialogue.

With "Preserve" and Protect" Drury's riatwing bias began to show. There's no rea-soj of course, why a novelist should not hold stung political views of whatever complexion, buwhen he impregnates his fiction with them hesiust expect to alienate those of his read--enwho think differently. In "The Throne of Salrn" Drury's political blinkers diminish wfcj might have been the first authoritative notl of Hie space age. story built around U. S.

U. S. S. R. rival in space is logical enough, but Drury has to project the Cold War at its worst into thelrild blue yonder.

Indeed, he has done it in so Melodramatic a fashion as to leave the rejter shaking his head instead of turning the pagg. Can you imagine a Russian astronaut tryig to murder an American on the moon and.being killed himself? The entire novel rest! on the premise that the Russians are goiij to fight us every inch of the way into spa to the point where our spacecraft have to bf armed against them. "lis being a novel, the novelist is entitled to 6am whatever he likes. But credibility is an esential ingredient in fiction of this type, and jnless you share the author's look-under-the-bdnfor-Commies paranoia you will find it diffkjll to suspend disbelief. Tl(s is a pity, for tfie technical aspects of the iterative are first-rate.

Drary went down to Huston and Cape Kennedy and researched the pfrject like the good reporter he is. But he brougit with him his distaste for the liberal press and politicians, whom he proceeds to stretol out on the Procrustean bed of his prejudces. Just as he attacked certain syn-dicatel columnists in an earlier novel, so now he flays newspapers in this one, "They epitomize! that most peculiarly American product, -tie Americans who despise America because she isn't as perfect as iy think she ought to be," They are castigated for opposing AUTHOR WILLIAM H. GASS integrates his essays FICTION AND THE FIGURES OF LIFE by William H. Gass.

Alfred A. Knopf. 288 pp. $6.95 Reviewed By W. G.

ROGERS pAUL VALERY wrote miscellaneous pieces not on his own initiative but because someone asked for them, Gass notes in his preface. Gass then confesses he has done the same: these two dozen articles were suggested or commissioned. I join their company; I too was asked to write about "Fiction and the Figures of Life." But I want to make it perfectly clear to quote mat man that I would have read this eagerly anyway, indeed maybe twice. One perusal exhausts most books, leaving flattened cardboards with nothing between like a pricked balloon. This has staying power, it does not deflate.

A reviewer confronts a book of this sort with misgivings. Two dozen articles commonly mean two dozen topics that range from cabbages to kings, and what can a man do with those riches in one short column? Should he touch every base or run over most of them lightly and expatiate on one or two? Gass by integrating his essays eliminates this problem; he has as many cross references as a concordance. A few striking points of view are explicated with care and exactitude, and they then echo and reverberate through the rest of the pages. From "Philosophy and the Form of Fiction" you are directed to "In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and tiie Figures of from "The Leading Edge of the Trash Phenomenon" to "Imaginary Borges and His and so on. "The novel does not say, it shows," Gass argues.

It begins with language, with sentences. It is in the large an outsize metaphor, a major truth perceived in terms of minor truths; and by some magic it, like its characters, is more than the sum of its parts. The novelist creates his own world, not yours or mine. Sadly needing a sympathetic reader, one capable of "poetic involvement," it aims to summon up this reader. In abstract terms little in it may be true or right, but it will prove adequate and credible within its own arbitrary framework.

Gass' shorter, complementary articles deal with Henry James he is not a complete convert to the estimates of Leon Edel though he grants Edel must be measured against the best of biograghers: Malcolm Lowry whose Cuemavaca Consul in "Under the Volcano" is a sot, worlds different from the fellow in "The Lost I. B. Singer, John Updike, D. H. Lawrence.

But in connection with his introductory material his inevitable choices THE PSYCHIC FORCE: Excursions In Parapsychology, edited by Allan Ang-off. BLOODY RIVER: The Real Tragedy of The Rapido, by Martin Blumenson. NATURAL SYMBOLS: Explorations in Cosmology, by Mary Douglas LIN PIAO: The Life and Writings of China's New Ruler, by Martin Ebon. ATLANTIS: The Autobiography of a Search, by Robert Ferro and M. Grumley.

CHILDREN AND SCIENCE, by Lazer Goldberg!" THE ALTERNATIVE: Communal Life In New America, by William Hedge-peth and Dennis Stock. A CROWN FOR ELIZABETH, by Mary Luke. SETTING THE COURSE: The First Year, by Richard Nixon. AMERICA'S LAST WILD HORSES, by Hope Ryden. Qiildren's Books STEFFIE AND ME, by Phyllis Hoffman.

HOUSE FULL OF MEN, by Ruth Link. SURPRISE ISLAND, by Barbara Wil-lard. DRAG RACING, by Charles Coombs. JESSE OWENS STORY, by Jesse Owens. NOVELIST ALLEN DRURY earth-bound story the first manned flight to Mars, and Drury stages a leftwing riot against the president when he arrives at the laundhpad for the takeoff.

If, as the novel suggests, the Cold War is to be carried into the empyrean, it might in fact be a good idea to spend the money instead on bettering life here on earth. Let it be noted that lunar exploration to, date has taken a direction opposite to Hhat envisaged in the book. The Americans got to the moon first and the Russians have contented themselves with unmanned lunar landings. So what? As for the 26nonth journey to Mars, I doubt very much whether it will be marked by the homicidal hostility postulated in these pages When he is grappling with technology Drury is convincing, but when he sees Red in the space program he loses me. Drury's attitude is summed up in a comment made by an American astronaut as a hostile Soviet spaceship approaches: "Same gang, same evil, same war." This one space novel that is definitely ear Unbound.

J. B. are Donald Barthelme, Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein. My own prejudices, commitments and allegiances being what they are, I call attention specifically to "Gertrude Stein: Her Escape from Protective Language." Gass essay, dated 1958, is a defense of Gdte, as she signed herself, from an attack by B. L.

Reid in "Art by Subtraction." "Once admired by few without judgment, she is now censured by many with reason," Gass reminds us. Dismissing literature as signs, she got down to what she called the bottom nature of her medium, to her medium bare; and as Gass properly identifies her, she who "made a vital thing of words" was the true revolutionary of her time. "Write and right" to her have nothing in common. There are most persuasive, most perceptively chosen quotes from "Three Lives" and "A Long Gay Book." I should like to add that she would have been delighted that Gass thought she, not James Joyce, a putative rival she never met but once, was the one to write about. Gass is witty and aphoristic with now a whiff of Veblen and now a dash of Rabelaisian spice.

And he is good-natured; he has the rare knack of finding fault without hurting feelings. You bruise and maybe bleed, but you are still friends. W. G. Rogers is with Saturday Review Syn dicate.

Essential Ingredients Gone From Novel Father's Day' Reflects The Expatriate Writer 'Merry Month Of May' One Of Jones5 Best FATHER'S DAY by William (loldman. Harcourt Brace JovanovichJ 214 pp. $5.95 WILLIAM GOLDMAN seems to bj still on his Broadway kick-not as playvright but as novelist and critic. A year ago itwas his scorching dissection of the Broadwatheater in semi-extremis, and now it's a novel i which Broadway serves as a phantasmagoric setting for the story's climax. The trouble is jiat the setting is superior to the story Goldman is very much the Now writer.

That is, he has pace, writes effervesce! prose and flip dialogue and limns character? with a crispness that stops just short of slickrtss. It's the same deft mixture that made "Dys and girls Together" a bestseller. In father's Day," however, there are essential inredients missing! To waste no time about it, the narntive (1) lacks credibility, and (2) the hero He father of the title is such a confused, ftvolous, prevaricating, irresponsible, Walter Mtty type that he starts by losing your smpathy end ends by losing your interest. Aios Mc-Cracken, the father, is a songwritej which may or may not account for his eccejtric behavior. But there comes a point at iich the reader at least this reader stops iying to rationalize chronic aberration.

Here we have a father recently divorced and living with a comely mistress. When we I meet him, he is still suffering fromthe song- his last musical. (The one before mat was a big hit.) Goldman's expertise is at its best in picturing the not-so-quiet desperation which engulfs a musical "in trouble" on the road. If the novel had only remained behind the scenes of show business, it could have been vintage Goldman. Instead it shrinks to an opusculum about a fatherland-daughter relationship.

Naturally the divorced mama has custody of the little girl, but father is allowed to take her out of school on "Father's Day." It's a bleak day for him; his mistress has walked out on him, his wife has cut his ego to shreds and he feels his mind as professionally blank as ever. But though the catchy lyrics and beguiling tunes have fled, the Mitty fantasies are wildly blooming. Amos and his daughter go swinging in Central Park, where the girl gets struck on the cheek and has to be hospitalized. Amos' overheated imagination plunges him into frantic emergencies which the patient reader has to disentangle from the facts. How can he confess his negligence to her already suspicious mother? Amos telephones the mother, lies about the accident, won't say what hospital the child is in, then lees with her.

Here Goldman shifts into high gear blending reality with fantasy in a wild chase through the sleazy moviehouse section of 42nd Street a sorry-go-round that may have spectacular cinematic potential leaves the reader numb over such misplaced energy. Goldman is a talented storyteller, but what eluded him here was a worthwhile theme. Speaking for myself, I'd like to read him in a backstage Broadway novel, which he is singularly well equipped to write. Wouldn't it be nice if "Father's Day" were just a warmup for same? J.B. up with more fournletter words in the book than there are currants in a cake.

In much the same way the story oscillates between two principal themes which Jones weaves into an impressive counterpoint. The first is the French student revolt, which for a time looked like toppling the De Gaulle regime. The other is a portrait of a supposedly happy American family disintegrating in Paris. The Gallaghers are well off. He is a successful screenwriter with a roving eye, his wife a handsome New Englander with Puritan morals and there's a teenage son at the Sor-bonne.

When the boy joins his fellow-students at the barricades, his parents are wholeheartedly behind the movement. Gallagher even promises to edit their film of the revolution which turns out to be an amateur mishmash. Jones also introduces a sexy black girl whose function is to expose the hypocritical parent generation. This she does by becoming the paramour of both father and son and a lesbian companion of the mother. In alternating scenes the boy and his fellow-students play their messianic roles going to pull you while simultaneously the parents indulge in their barnyard behavior.

The campus revolt fails and the mother is driven to attempt suicide. The last we see of the boy is when he goes off to a cave in the mountains of Spain to "meditate" in a hippie colony. Come to think of it, it was in the mountain caves of Altamira, Spain, that Paleoithic man once lived. A return to the womb? "The Merry Month of May" is Jones' best novel since "The Thin Red Line." Parts of it are steeped in the crude sexuality of "Go to the Widow-Maker," but when he remembers to be his narrator he writes with a cool precision that we have not seen from him in years. Best of all, there's none of that surly resentment that has flawed so much of his longer fiction.

This is a calmer, more dispassionate, more sophisticated Jones with none of the old visceral reflexes, putting one word after the other the first genuine product of the "European" with surprising detachment. I see this novel as James Jones, pointing the way to a rewarding new direction. John Barkham is editor of Saturday Review Syndicate. THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY by James Jones. Delacorte Press.

361 pp. $7.95 Reviewed by John Barkham piRST CAME THE would-be shakers of the world, then the writers to tell all about it. Our own campus rebels have already inspired a whole shelfful of books, and here now is James Jones no less with a novel of the French student revolt of 1968, which began with a bang and ended with a whimper. Jones has lived in Paris for over a decade, but this is the first of his books to date which reflects the expatriate writer. He even has a reference in the book to contemporary American expatriates whom he calls "the Drunk Generation," presumably for cause.

His first-person narrator, Jim Hartley, is a "failed poet and failed novelist" now editing a little magazine in Paris. Hartley's function is to tell the story and serve as a catalyst when needed. For those familiar with the Jones canon it is interesting to watch Hartley, the of the story, alternating between being Hartley and being Jones. Thus we are told that Hartley is a rather prim and proper fellow, a clean liver, a sometime drinker and a staid conversationalist who squirms when he hears four-letter words. "I never used them myself." Yet on the very same page he plunges into scatology and winds I GAUL'S COMPLETE BOOK STORE In West Hroteard It's na CROWH LAUDERHILl MALL 587-8505 In Pompano Beach Lantern nook Shop 24 Ocanntid Cantor 941-0321 CORAL RIDGE SHOPPINfi PLAZA All Categories and Paperbacks Establish 1946 565-3411 writer's oiock which iea to nis cismisai irom I.