Books: The Ugly Sibling

THE SOUND OF THUNDER (608 pp.) —Taylor Caldwell—Doubleday ($3.95)

W. C. Fields once related the hung-over horror of awaking on New Year’s Day with the fantastic impression that a manhole cover was resting on his head. “Imagine my surprise,” concluded the great man, “when I reached up and found out there was a manhole cover resting on my head.” Without benefit of liquor, this sensation is available to the reader of the works (This Side of Innocence, Tender Victory) of Janet Miriam Taylor Caldwell.

To her admirers, who have bought some 7,000,000 copies of her novels in the last 20 years, it will be good and sufficient news that another literary manhole cover is rolling their way. The Sound of Thunder, book No. 18 on the Caldwell production line, has the usual assets: an inchoate style, specious profundities, embryonic character portrayal, oppressively inconsequential detail—all embossed on a favorite theme, the troubled rise of a business tycoon. About the only noncounterfeit quality of Thunder is the solid clunk it will make high on the bestseller list.

Four Geniuses & a Dolt. The book begins in epilogue with grey-eyed, whey-faced Edward Enger lying gravely ill on a bed in his mansion after a coronary attack. His wife is beside the bed and beside herself: “Oh my darling, my life, my blood, my hope, my God.”

What led poor Ed to his bed of pain? The story begins back in his turn-of-the-century childhood, when he is a dutiful teen-ager slaving away in his German-American father’s “Lilliputian delicatessen.” Father and mother have taught him that his three brothers and a sister are geniuses, but that he is a dolt. He takes it in good grace: “I sure wish I was an artist, a genius, thought Edward, instead of being dumb like I am.” Dumb Ed has a dumb friend, a little pet hen that pecks “feverishly at his lips and cheeks” when he is not busy slicing salami. One day Ed’s youngest brother lets the hen out of the coop to be eaten by a cat. Any psychologically oriented reader can guess that this traumatic experience makes Ed mean, hard, ambitious—the ugly sibling.

As Ed Enger rises to become the “imported delicacies” king of U.S. grocery-dom, he drags others with him on a golden leash. For the sister who cannot act he builds a theater. The brother who cannot paint is sent to Paris to daub away, and the brother who likes boogie-woogie is made to play Bach. Meanwhile, he nurses an albatross complex about the economic deadweights he has to carry.

Metal Fatigue. The years pass; the people age as if dipped in a Max Factor makeup kit; and Author Caldwell has ample opportunity to punctuate her chapters with page-long diatribes in favor of God, the Fourth of July, the U.S. Constitution (“I worry only about the Amendments”), and against Satan, Communism, the graduated income tax.

Toward novel’s end, Ed is hip-deep in Depression debts and visibly suffering from what engineers call “metal fatigue.” After his heart attack, that ancient sibyl, Mother Enger, finally diagnoses her son’s case—he has been playing God when he should have been praying to God. In proof that Mother knows best (albeit four decades late), an old colleague promptly drops dead, leaving ”over ten million dollars. And, Ed … he left you five of them and the rest to the Church!” Well on the road to recovery, Ed is presumably free of all further worries except what his author may do to him in a sequel.