Books: Writer Wrong

AN ANSWER FROM LIMBO (322 pp.) —Brian Moore—Atlantic-Little, Brown ($5).

To hear the writers tell it. all writers have bad characters, if indeed they have any character at all. Matricides may be dealt with kindly in novels, an author may find a spark of good in a drug-addicted card cheat or a grasping banker, and it is an immutable law that prostitutes’ hearts are warm. But let a novelist introduce a wretch whose vice is writing novels, and there begins a recital of character faults that would have horrified Caligula: the fellow is meanspirited, lazy, a coward, lustful but inept at sex. soggy with drink, cruel to his children, and two months behind on the phone bill.

Brian Moore, the talented Irish-Canadian author of The Feast of Lupercal and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, is the latest novelist to turn savagely on his own kind. Moore’s miscreant hero is Brendan Tierney, a young Belfast short-storyist who has emigrated to New York and lost his faith, acquiring in its place a magazine job, some fake Danish furniture and an authentic American wife. Brendan’s problem is that he is almost 30, the age at which a promising writer either writes something or becomes merely a pawned talent.

Moved to action by the severest shock a writer can sustain—a friend two years younger announces that his own novel is to be published—Brendan finds a solution. He imports his dear old mother from Belfast to look after the two children, puts his wife to work, quits the magazine, and dusts off his old manuscript. The novel goes well (the reader is never told what it is about, and it may, indeed, be about a writer), but nothing else does. Mother Tierney cannot understand Brendan’s wife, and is shocked by the paganism of his household; she baptizes the children in the bathroom. The wife resents everything—Mother Tierney, the novel, her job—and gets even by having an affair with the sort of slob whose pants do not have cuffs.

“You’ll sacrifice other people for your work, but will you sacrifice yourself?” a friend asks Brendan, and at the book’s end Brendan thinks the answer is yes. Supposing himself to be the cause of the calamities that have overtaken the Tierney family, he figures that he has made the supreme sacrifice to his art by turning himself into a thoroughgoing bastard.

And yet is he, really? Novelist Moore obviously thinks so. But to the reader, Brendan seems unpleasant but no monster of iniquity; his wife, on the other hand, is a certifiable bitch, and her bitchery has very little to do with her husband’s occupation. Without much question, Moore has got hold of the wrong villain, something an artist of his skill would not do if his topic had not blurred his vision.