Volume 1, Number 5 · October 31, 1963
Trials and Errors
By George P. Elliott
The Journey and the Pity
by Pawel Mayewski
Scribner, 178 pp., $3.50
Seconds
by David Ely
Pantheon, 181 pp., $3.95
What is a novelist to do who not only loathes his society but also intends his novel to make you loathe that society too? Realism will not be adequate to his purpose, even if he is, like Flaubert, a giant of perversity able to sustain his loathing through years of loving attention to the minutiae of his characters' lives. For finally realism contains an irreducible residue of conservatism: by his very devotion in portraying it, the realistic novelist is saying that society is worth something, if only his and our attention. A really radical rejection must turn to fantasy to prove itself. In a satire or allegory or even a science-fiction futuristic story, the author may be saying, among other things, that he loathes the suggested society so much he can look at it only through the distorting glass of fantasy. He will be free to disregard all those inconvenient attractions along the way which occur in even the worst actual society—fidelity to friends, for example, or doing a job well—and which must be included if a realistic portrait is to be credible. This, I think, goes a long way to account for the prevalence of the type of fiction to which the two novels here under consideration belong, the accusing fantasy. It takes no pathological excess of moral bile to loathe one of the great twentieth-century nations at its very roots.
Review, 1435 words
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