Books: Revelations the Snow Ball

When PBS adapted three John Cheever stories for TV in 1979, Playwright A.R. Gurney Jr. (The Dining Room, Scenes from American Life) seemed ideally suited to write one of the scripts. Gurney has been for the stage what Cheever was for fiction: the foremost chronicler of the foibles and angst of the Wasp upper middle class. The adaptation succeeded. But it also pointed up a significant difference between Cheever’s striving suburbia and Gurney’s blue- blood Buffa- lo: while many of Cheever’s bedeviled characters are avidly accumulating, almost all of Gurney’s etiolated aristocrats are watching the family fortune fade away.

In his third novel, as in his 16 plays, Gurney remains a mordantly comic eulogist whose strengths are mood, milieu and character. The title refers to a black-tie dance, the grandest event on the social calendar back when there was a Society. The privileged crowd thinned out in the ’60s, when the young singles and couples moved on to other cities or, more likely, the suburbs, to alcohol or to the angry consciousness of the Viet Nam epoch. Two decades later, a couple of nostalgic veterans of the deb-party circuit decide to revive the Snow Ball. Cooper Jones is a wearily married vice president of the real estate company founded by his grandfather; Lucy Dunbar is an irritable divorcee. In planning the dance, they lapse into a perfunctory affair.

Cooper’s and Lucy’s fondest hope is to reunite Jack and Kitty, once the Astaire and Rogers of their set. In keeping with the deflected dreams of the rest of the crowd, Kitty has been married three times and has become a prematurely old, discreetly tipsy Florida matriarch. Jack, who wed the girl he made pregnant in Georgetown days, is the boyishly charming and faintly untrustworthy Lieutenant Governor of Indiana. After much mischance, Jack and Kitty do return to Buffalo, the Snow Ball and each other’s arms. The climax is, predictably, anticlimax, a sad proof that the old Wasp world is beyond recapture.

As always, Gurney has a keen eye and ear for the revealing trait: the parents so in love with their young children that they wake them in mid-evening, just to be with them some more; the long-married woman who reflexively takes on the opposite mood to whatever her husband is feeling; the house salesman who comes close to true rapture in envisioning domestic bliss for all his customers. When Kitty, the best-sketched figure, loses her second husband to another man, the reader can guess the precise tone in which she describes her rival to divert sympathy: “Don’t be silly. He’s a nice man. If he had asked me, I would have moved in with him myself.”

The Snow Ball, like the best of Gurney’s plays, is full of virtuosities. It is deft, insightful and winsome. The author’s persistent tic is an unwillingness, perhaps an inability, to tell a straightforward story. No more than a few pages at a time of The Snow Ball unfold in chronological sequence. Instead, there are flashbacks, flashes forward, and crosscuts from one life story to another. Gurney is a master at this counterpoint. But he provides no crescendo, no epiphany. Despite many charms, The Snow Ball melts into fond but vague memory.