Books: The Disenchanted Forest

A SENSE OF VALUES (604 pp.)—Sloan Wilson—Harper ($4.95).

In the days of Balzac and Galsworthy, the novel could legitimately deal with a businessman’s success (through ambition and thrift) or with his failure (through greed, circumstance or the follies of love). A distinctly American contribution to the art of fiction is the discovery that success is failure. In the first 500 novels devoted to this notion, the unimpeachable moral that a man may lose his soul while making money proved reasonably arresting, but by now, the theme has become an overpowering bore and need no longer be written; it can be assembled from the fictioneer’s cliché kit. The recurrence of the theme may prove, as some claim, a deep uneasiness in American materialist society; or it may merely prove the uneasiness (or an eye on an easy market) among American writers. The latest, 604-page redundancy by Sloan (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit) Wilson may also serve a purpose: to stimulate total disenchantment with the disenchantment novel.

Toys from Anti-Santa. Nathan Bond, Author Wilson’s protagonist, runs true to formula. In most disenchantment novels, the hero is a non-hero who attends an Ivy League college (Nathan goes to Yale), where he is traumatically snubbed because he lacks good looks or money, the two top things, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it. Lacking popularity, the non-hero decides to be different (Nathan wants to be an artist), but he invariably deserts his goal and runs rabbit-scared for life’s lettuce (Nathan becomes a cartoonist and creates a Chaplinesque tramp called “Rollo the Magnificent”).

But before the non-hero can be properly launched on his affluent career, otherwise known as the rat race, he must have a mate so that he can share his disenchantment. Early snapshots of his beloved are etched indelibly in the non-hero’s mind, partly because he always lives his life flashbackwards. Nathan is forever recalling Amy arched against the sky on a diving board at poolside on her aunt’s rambling estate. In disenchantment novels, these rambling estates are the toys of a gracious childhood soon to be whisked away by that legendary anti-Santa, the ’29 crash. Nathan has his losses too—a father to cancer, a mother to an insane asylum. As Novelist Wilson handles them, these are life’s little ironies.

Once Nathan’s cartooning clicks, he and Amy move to Connecticut, where non-heroes almost always live. The couple has the standard nonheroic family, one boy, one girl. Nathan eventually makes $100,000 a year, above par for a non-hero, but the tax bite devours his bank balance. After a few years of this and nearly two decades of marriage, Nathan discovers, with the customary belated double take of the non-hero, that he does not know his wife, his children, or himself.

Vacuum Keening. At this point the non-hero always has two anodynes for his despair: 1) alcohol, 2) another woman. Author Wilson generously allows Nathan to sample both. Amy has an adulterous fling of her own after which the following dialogue ensues:

” ‘I want a divorce,’ she said.

‘Amy! Think of the children.’ ”

Nonetheless, they do not think of the children and decide on a divorce. But the non-hero can never let ill enough alone. Nathan and Amy are clinching at the close: “Her hands told me that she needed me and . . . the shrill keening of the vacuum cleaner in the next room suddenly seemed like music to me, a wail of desperation, perhaps, but more than that, a sound of effort and hope.”

This story may appeal to fans of vacuum keening. For others it will seem only a smooth and utterly mediocre version of an over-familiar American morality play.