Books: I Remember Grandmamma

BEFORE MY TIME (638 pp.)—Niccoló Tucci—Simon & Schuster ($7.50).

Literary critics who lament the emasculating effect that standard New Yorker fiction has had on the short story now have something larger to fret about: the formula has been applied to the novel.

Predictably, the perpetrator is a New Yorker writer named Niccolo Tucci. Predictably, too, the result is an enormous (and plotless) volume in which the small, repetitious encounters of a rich, upper-class fin de siécle family (Tucci’s) are recollected with all the intensity and detail that Tolstoy lavished on the battle of Borodino. Before My Time may be the only book in history that—in somewhat more than half the length of War and Peace (1,146 pages)—allows its characters somewhat less emotional development than Peter Rabbit (59 pages).

Rich Target. Happily, Writer Tucci has nearly enough brilliance to get away with it. The worldly ménage he depicts in this semifictional account is a rich target for subtlety and sophistication. It is the retinue of Sophie von Randen, Tucci’s Russian grandmamma, who moseys about the Europe of 1900 with a French cook, a German governess, a small art gallery and an ornate chaise percée, buying palatial houses or taking over a whole floor of a fancy hotel wherever her widowish whim pleases her to stop.

The old lady has enlightened philosophical thoughts, kept in a much-quoted journal, but she systematically torments her daughter Mary and her provincial Italian son-in-law (who were to be Tucci’s parents), both of them tied to her by a mixture of love and guilt, fear and financial dependence. The rest of the family tries to stay at safe telegraph distance from Grandmamma and hope for the best.

Green Blood & Epigram. At his best, Tucci can stand in a rococo drawing room and, with an epigram, nail a passing character to the wall at 40 paces. A plebeian German archaeologist who wants to marry into the family is fit only for “books and tools for blazing jungle trails and utensils for cooking vagrant cats on open fires.” With satanic delight Tucci describes the grown-up Von Randen children’s feelings about Fräulein Luther, their sickeningly humble governess. They all wanted “to kick her, but kicking such a person is like kicking a huge worm that will cling to the foot, filling the shoe with green, sugary blood, and die looking at us with sad eyes.”

Author Tucci’s purpose in delving into a family history that occurred before he was born at first seems to be to work a filial hatchet job. “I was born a good child,” he explains. “Had I lost both of my parents at the age of three or four, I still might have become a good man.” But even Tucci’s vitriol is mixed with the Vichy water of old-worldly wisdom and a droll sense of the hopeless absurdity of the situation. His mother, with characteristic lack of proportion, is inconsolably sad because Grandmamma will not forgive her for trying to have the cook fired. Grandmamma, whose most self-satisfying role is to suffer over the imagined cruelty of her children, is furious at this. “It was for her to suffer,” Tucci writes, “not for Mary. In the presence of the god, how dare a simple priest feel the offense to the faith more than the god himself? There is no graver form of sacrilege than taking Christ’s place on the Cross.”

Merely a Prelude. In Before My Time Tucci suggests (and his publishers confirm) that the book is merely a prelude to a series of autobiographical novels. But Tucci takes far too long to make his biographical points. Again and again he shows the same characters playing the same emotional parts: the domineering old woman, the haplessly childish daughter, the faintly struggling son-in-law. Each family anecdote would make a good (if somewhat bloated) New Yorker sketch. But, because only members of a family have limitless interest in family idiosyncrasies, the sum of Before My Time is interminably less than its parts. With skill at re-creating the rich past, Tucci has hand-tooled a glittering vintage automobile. It is a perfect replica, with genuine brass driving lamps and a burled walnut dashboard. All it lacks is a motor.