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
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