Volume 23, Number 10 · June 10, 1976
Crying for Attention
By Michael Wood
Ordinary People
by Judith Guest
Viking, 263 pp., $7.95
The 400 Eels of Sigmund Freud
by A.G. Mojtabai
Simon and Schuster, 258 pp., $7.95
The Comatose Kids
by Seymour Simckes
Fiction Collective, 114 pp., $8.95
The Geek
by Craig Nova
Harper & Row, 201 pp., $8.95
Fiction is full of exiles from ordinary life: stranded, marginal, baffled, sulking, deluded, or violent creatures. Indeed, some sort of snag or hitch or resistance, some lapse from expectations, is probably necessary to get any story started. If Odysseus had stayed at home, there would have been no Odyssey. This is obvious enough, but it does mean that fiction, and perhaps even narrative, can have very little hold on ordinary life, since ordinary life, like Ithaca, is what has to be abandoned at the outset. Judith Guest's Ordinary People, for example, is a rather bland and far from ironic novel, yet its title hints at a complicated irony. On the one hand, the book suggests, there are no ordinary people; people are all extraordinary in their way, both finer and feebler than we think. And on the other hand, ordinary people are what we may become, if we can conquer our fear of being extraordinary. In a novel, that fear has to be acted out. In Ordinary People, it is the novel, the trace of a season of exile.
Review, 3215 words
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