Books: This Side of Parody

Mimicry is a compliment that talent pays to fame. In new novels, two talented fledgling writers pay their respects to F. Scott Fitzgerald, dazzled poet of enchanted youth, and to John P. Marquand, the wry prosist of disenchanted middle age.

BARBARA SREER, by Stephen Birmingham (371 pp.; Little, Brown; $4.50), is based on a standard Marquand gambit—you can go home again, and again, and again. As she sees herself, Barbara is a yacht-club girl in a rowboat basin. Locustville, Pa. is an industrial town, and her husband Carson is an organization nomad in a Brooks Brothers shirt. When Carson heads for London on one of his periodic sales junkets, Barbara deposits their two little boys with the maid and flies off like a homing pigeon to her dear old home in gracious, spacious Burketown, Conn.

The graciousness is under pressure, she soon discovers. Her father, silver-haired Preston Woodcock III. is juggling martinis instead of balancing the family paper company’s books. Her mother is outwardly butter-smooth, inwardly alum-bitter. Her cousin Woody is an effeminate dandy swooning before his hi-fi set, while sister Peggy is briskly infighting for some stock proxies to oust another cousin who “robbed us of damned near every red cent we own!” The Adam in this snaky Garden of Eden is Peggy’s husband Barney Callahan. a morosely charming outlander (Massachusetts Irish) who convinces the troubled Barbara that she is Eve—with disastrous consequences.

Author Birmingham may be thanked for a series of small fictional favors. He can find a status symbol in a haystack (“French bread means somebody for dinner”). He makes nurses and vice presidents and suburbanites speak with tape-recorded fidelity and occupational rightness. And his multiple flashbacks rarely loom up like detour signs. Unfortunately, mannerisms do not make the man, and Novelist Birmingham’s deft social observations lack the probing roots of Marquand’s social experience.

THE GOLDEN YOUTH OF LEE PRINCE, by Aubrey Goodman (344 pp.; Simon & Schuster; $4.50), belies the gloom criers who think that U.S. youth consists entirely of beard bearers on one hand and IBM trainees on the other. There are still gold-hatted, high-bouncing young men who know their way to the washroom in the Union Club. In his resplendently gold-jacketed first novel, Yaleman Goodman, 23, lists a few undergraduate acolytes who keep the torch flaming: “Lawlor Reck, who had won the Charleston contest at the Everglades Club in Florida for six years running . . . one of the Du Pont boys . . . Lou Bond, who was from San Francisco and had no toes.”

The bluest blade of them all is Lee Prince, who is merely rich, charming as a puppy, the handsomest man in the Ivy League, a handy athlete, hard drinker, scholar, and an author with a collection of short stories to his credit before he attains his majority. When he takes his girl friend to Bermuda (this at 17 or so), he does not buy the island, but, next best, he rents a taxi for the entire stay and wins a samba tournament. ”They were something!” an onlooker reports breathlessly. “She always wore blue, and Lee always wore white. And I’ve never seen any two people drink so much and hold it so well.”

Considering how much of F. Scott Fitzgerald Author Goodman has guzzled, he holds his influence quite well. An occasional paraphrase falls painfully shy of the master; e.g., Fitzgerald’s “There are no second acts in American lives.” becomes “There doesn’t seem to be any Senior Year in life.” If the old quiver-liver had not drunk himself to death years before, he might be tempted to stand Goodman to an orange squash at the Yale Club—or boot him into the fountain at the Plaza.