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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Dec. 8, 1978)
ilmpersand deserv ed beating, and the peculiar inhuman ity of that system is another of Neuman’s thematic concerns. As a mystery, The Seclusion Room is not especially good. In a successful mystery, the perpetrator is revealed in specific events and these are what damn him in the end. The better the mystery, the more subtle and Digging Archaeology The Luck of Nineveh (McGraw-Hill, $14.95) purports to be the story of Austen Henry Layard, discoverer of the ruins of Nineveh, Babylon and other Biblical sites, and father of Assyriology. As the tale of a model Victo rian hero—explorer, scholar, writer, ar chaeologist, diplomat and adventurer—it should be, and sometimes is, a fascinating account. Yet the limited success The Luck of Nineveh achieves in telling its story is almost entirely due to the circumstances of Layard’s life and times, as opposed to any new insight the hackneyed and ineffectual writing of author Arnold C. Brackman could bring to this biography. The amazing exploits of Layard in Mesopotamia during the middle of the 19th Century as recounted in The Luck of Nineveh should encourage any reader interested in the history of archaeology to throw down this uninspired effort and seek out (^yard's own account of his travels and discoveries. Brackman as much as tells us this in his de scriptions of Layard’s literary triumphs. Nineveh and Its Remains, the first of a highly successful series penned by Layard (followed by Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana and Baby lon,; [hscoverxes in the Ruins of Nineveh and Baby lon, and others) is described as a runaway bestseller of the time, a classic of the period later to be compared with Vanity Fair and jane Eyre as epitomes of Victorian literature. Brackman goes so far as to suggest that Layard’s writings became the stylistic foun dation for all subsequent books by ar chaeologists concerning their discoveries. So why, Brackman seems inadvertently to be saying, are you wasting your time on this turgid, cliche-ridden tome when you could be getting the real stuff? Brackman’s grating habit of using Biblical and Assyrian quotes as chapter headings is indicative of where this book has gone wrong. For instance, the chap ter dealing w ith Layard's removal of statues from the Nineveh site opens with the quota tion, “1 departed from Nineveh — Ashurnasirpal," proving only that Assyrians wrote down mundane things as often as any other culture. In spite of Brackman’s wretched job, the adventures of Austen Henry Layard, his con tribution to our know ledge of the past and the authentication, through his work, of history’s most compelling myths, makes for fascinat ing reading. All the more reason to capture the full flavor of the man, his time and place, from firsthand accounts. Layards's books are classics . . . Brackman’s will never be. Oavin Seay Moral Ain’t Necessarily Good As the title—On Moral Fiction by John Gard ner (Basic Books, $8.95) — indicates, this is a work of judgment where the author decries the current state of the novel. Under the banner of “Moral Fiction” Gardner also manages to belittle many of his contem poraries while implicitly praising himself. Regrettably, the phrase was no clearer to me after reading this book than before. It seems to be something the classic novels had; they were, in Gardner’s words, "models of human action.” The novels of today are merely “language-sculpture.” What Gardner sees as the fragmentation of traditional literature is the writer’s attempt to keep fiction alive by mirroring our reality and trying to transcend it: that, after all, is what literature is supposed to do. But Gardner condemns contemporary novels in terms that make us ieei their authors have left heaps of language lying about somewhere: they are filled with “stunning effects, yet fraudulent and adven titious novelty, rant.” However fuzzy this theorizing may be, it certainly pales in comparison to Gardner’s attacks on his contemporaries in what is the most impassioned section of this work. He lumps together such diverse talents as Philip Roth, Walker Percy, Joan Didion, Saul Bellow, and Joseph Heller; tries them, and finds them guilty of “black peeves,” “creepy characters” and (in Bellow’s case) “sprawl ing works of advice, not art.” That all this should come from one of the most prestigious (though not commercially successful) novelists of the era should be enough to make the reader suspect; about the only major novelist to escape Gardner’s attack is Gardner himself. Most readers will find in Gardner’s fiction a world stuck in yesterday, or more accurately, thirty years ago, mired as it is in the psuedo-realistic style of the 1940s. His novels are certainly “models of human action,” but at the expense of humor, joy, and language, sculptured or not. And it is to exactly this kind of literature that Gardner would have us return, so that even his most righteous indignations are, ulti mately, self-serving. Unfortunately, Norman Mailer has already used the title—how much better it would have been to call this work Advertisements for Myself. Mark Bacich Dirty Work in the Cuckoo’s Nest I must preface these comments on Fredric Neuman’s novel, The Seclusion Room (Viking, $8.95), by saying that it arrived for review when I was in the middle of a book by Peter De Vries, surely one of our most consistently droll writers. I grudgingly put De V'ries aside in order to meet a deadline. In addition, the Neuman novel is harrowingiy similar to one I recently wrote myself, and which I have had a bitch of a time getting a publisher to read. These circumstances, perhaps, stacked the odds, but even so, The Seclusion Room suc ceeded admirably in providing an entertain ing couple of hours of reading. The story is set in a mental institution, and is narrated by Dr. Abe Redden, a psychiatrist on the staff. It is a murder mystery, written in standard whodunit fashion. A patient is found dead in the seclusion room in the first chapter, and the rest of the book revolves around the question, murder or suicide? About midway through, another body turns up, this time of a nurse, and here the question is, murder or accident? The answers to these questions are simultaneously pursued by Dr. Redden and a police detective named Moore, who is vaguely evocative of Columbo, and the counterpoint of their differing motives and methods gives the book one of its themes. As the narrative progresses, contemporary psychiatric practice takes its usual well complex the web of these events, but here, the events, the facts, follow no intricate logic. One might waste a good deal of effort trying to figure out the presence of a towel over a TV camera which could have filmed the crime, only to learn that a paranoid schizophrenic covered it because she thought it shot rays at her. This may be a perfectly realistic instance of schizophrenic behavior, but it does not exemplify tightly reasoned mystery writing. The plot, then, is not particularly imagina tive and one gets the feeling that Neuman isn’t much interested in it anyway. The story serves mainly as a vehicle through which he can present amusing incidents and reveal his characters, and on that score, the book fares better. Dr. Redden is the best developed and most interesting figure in the novel. He is a disheveled, sarcastic and depressed indi vidual with a better than average mind and a genuine, if grudging, concern for mankind. One minor character is also a m_arvelous and grisly creation—the forensic pathologist. Dr. Berman. He is first encountered doing a post mortem which is the occasion of some of the book’s most grotesquely funny passages. Later, he discourses on death by strangula tion, with special reference to issues of tidiness. "When someone hangs really properly, ... he dies very abruptly because his spinal cord is torn off between the medulla and the pons. Now if the drop is too high, fifteen to twenty feet, for instance, the head comes flying right off, and blood In keeping uith nur holiday theme. De rerabfr’s Ampersand of the Month is a jolly Miouman. sent to us hv Jerome Annt n ol ( ortaJlis. Ort^un. nou S2V00 ri< her. If any of ihr rest ol \ ou feel espe ciallv treatise. st nd \our wurk^ of art (original, in blat k ink on uhite paper, and he neat' to Ampersand of the Month. 1680 N. V me Street. Suite 201. I lolly wood, tA 00028. spatters all over everyone.” Delightful man. The Seclusion Room does offer diverting reading and it certainly beats an evening of television. Television, however, is free, and at the $8.95 hard-cover price, one might be well advised to wait for the paperback edition. This is not a book to be read again and again, and one wonders, in fact, why publishers don’t bring books of this sort out in soft cover in the first place. . _ . r J.C. Norton feet: this protects your most important hi-fi investment. Trying to economize by putting off the replace ment of a worn stylus could be like throwing away five dollars every time you play a record. 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