The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • Page 115

THE COURIER-JOURNAL, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 22. 1987 I if OOKS BROTHERS By William Goldman Warner 310 pp. $17.95 Seclusion niay be way JE). Salinger k6eps from evening with Milo, Connie and Arnie," are hardly aware they they them-j selves are on the receiving end of some particularly vicious treatment William Goldman's complicated, plot ties these bizarre happenings to a massively evil scheme by militaristic elements in the U.S. govern-1; ment whose aim is to start Worfd, War III.

To prevent this unthinkable event Perkins, director of a covert government agency, decides to urrect his most trusted and able kill-' er, an agent called Scylla. It seems-; that the invaluable Scylla, who was1" shot and killed in Goldman's earlier thriller, "Marathon Man," is not dead after all. Scylla has been practicing his esoteric skills while sequestered on a. remote Caribbean island and emerges, without fingerprints and with a radically altered face, as the perfect killing machine. His Find out what the militaristic ments are up to and stop them' quickly.

Readers looking for a sequel to "The Marathon Man" will be sorely! disappointed. There is only a quick reunion between the two brothers to, link the books. Goldman writes with wit much of it directed at his own wildly imagi- native ploys. But for the most part'v'' the novel is disjointed and ingly slow. Reviewed by Shirley K.

Murray, Louisville free-lance writer. reader wants to understand it that way, Holden may also be heading for a nervous breakdown. His ultra-sensitivity imd undecelvable integrity have put him at war with the false world of the grownups. The novel is as slick a glamoriza-tion of familiar adolescent malaise as has ever been put in print Just as "Werther" set off a wave of suicides in the early Romantic era, Salinger's novel hyped up business for the psychiatrists and the therapy clinics. It may even have helped to bring on the political commotions of the 1960s, when the attitudes of disaffected adolescence caught on with older people and became the prevailing public mood.

Under full light of the skepticism with which the book can now be read, it nevertheless survives as a postwar classic. Holden Caulfield is an enduring presence In American fiction like Sinclair Lewis' George F. Babbitt and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby of an earlier time. The book may be saturated with evidence of a callow sensibility, but the execution of the novel is a feat of dazzling professionalism.

Telling the story in the first-person voice of the teen-ager, Salinger performed a ventriloquist act possible only to a writer with an amazingly acute ear. He crammed every paragraph with vividly communicative detail and sandpapered the writing to a smooth and lustrous polish. After "The Catcher in the Rye," Salinger's next benefaction to his eager public was a set of separate but connected stories that gave enigmatic glimpses into the saga of a family of eccentric geniuses named Glass. The younger Glasses, children of an Irish-Jewish vaudeville team, are all alumni of a radio quiz show for child prodigies. They are now grown up, except for one, Seymour, who died a suicide, but left a legacy of religious mysticism to the others.

Thanks partly to his influence, they are subject to deep metaphysical-emotional crises, although these dark nights of the soul never inter fere with their winsome lovability and their skill with a quip. Like Holden, they are set apart by their sensitivity, wit, learning and general superiority from the phoniness that they are pained to observe in the rest of humanity. By the time of the appearance of the avidly awaited "Franny and Zooey," which was an installment in the Glass-family body of myth, Salinger was triumphantly popular. In that essay in The Atlantic 25 years ago, Kazin hit on a four-letter word of criticism that in its on-tar-get precision, must have pierced Salinger to the inner parts. "I am sorry," Kazin wrote, "to have to use the word 'cute' in respect to Salinger, but there is no other word that for me so accurately typifies the self-concious charm and prankishness of his own writing and his extraordinary cherishing of his favorite Glass characters." It would be Interesting to know if, in the course of maturing years, Salinger hasnt grown dissatisfied with at least certain elements of his work and come to believe that his critics weren't altogether talking through their hats.

Almost everybody who has practiced writing at any level knows what it feels like to blush over work in print and feel like hiding in the nearest bush. It may be that even a writer of so powerful a talent as Salinger's is not armored against this kind of overpowering self-doubt Whatever bearing this may have had on his long silence and seclusion, he reportedly still is writing and working at it daily. There are examples of men who have written classics James T. Farrell, to name one who lived a long time afterward and went on writing only to be ignored or laughed at Salinger has at least found a way not to be Ignored. Perhaps, in those 22 years of writing to no readers, he has found a better way not to be ignored which the world will some day be allowed to know about FILE PHOtOw Works by University of Louisville professors, Leon V.

Driskell, at i left, and Sena Naslund, above, appear in short-story collections. This novel begins with three intriguing and seemingly unconnected scenarios. In the bucolic English village of Tring, two well-bred brothers, 6 and 8, buy chocolates at Abromson's candy store and slowly walk away to eat their sweets. As they pause in front of an elegant suburban home, they are mercifully unaware of the mammoth explosion that engulfs both the home and themselves in No one inquires about the children. Abromson alone expresses concern and shortly afterward dies of a heart attack.

In the small American community of Neptune, two intelligent and highly motivated high schoolers, Audrey and Scott confidently plan their bright future together. When Audrey's beloved Uncle Arky drops by to offer a toast to their future success in college, they willingly oblige. Later the two commit suicide. In the slums of New York, Connie and Arnie, a murderously psychotic couple, entertain themselves by savagely beating casual pickups. Then they meet Milo Standish, whose mild and innocuous manner makes him the perfect target After an PHOTO BY SUE DRISKELL NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH The Year's Best 1986 Edited by Shannon Ravenel Algonquin 256 pp.

$15.95, $9.95 pb THESE OTHER LANDS Stories from the Heartland Edited by Heartland Fiction Collective Westphalia Press 176 pp. $16.95, $8.95 pb One of the few original American contributions to the arts is the modern short story, whose form and purpose were decided some 150 years ago by such writers as Poe and Hawthorne. Unfortunately, the large number of magazines with huge circulations (and budgets) that fostered the genre have largely disappeared. The serious writer of short stories now has few places to send his work. Two recent collections with 17 stories from the American South and 19 from the Midwest however, are proof of the short story's continuing appeal and liveliness.

Most of them originally appeared in "little" magazines with modest circulations. Both collections attempt to present regional stories that are not provincial. The Southern stories succeed admirably. Editor Shannon Ravenel uses as her shibboleth for inclusion the Southerner's "homing" instinct and indeed most of the stories relate to families and home. They range geographically from Virginia across the lower South to Texas and display the region's colorful diversity.

Readers will find the familiar South of pecan groves, Coca-Cola, Jitney-Jungles, rabbit tobacco. Baptists and grits even scuppernong arbors and chitlins. There are also the expected Gothic touches: a hairdresser who sets her dead mother's hair for burial; a woman who sets a record by standing on one foot for 35 hours; the chilling portrait of an amoral teen-aged hedonist The sense of place is stamped in authentic sights, sounds and smells. But it is also the South updated, a land of Pizza Huts, Eastland Malls, riding lawn mowers, professional baseball umpires and a liberal white farmer from south Louisiana who tries to befriend an escaped black convict. Preachers ask sinners to give up such "crutches" as tranquilizers, sedatives, marijuana, antacids and antihistamines.

Walter Cronkite is as well known as the local high school principal. I' being ignored A appellate court recently blocJjpQ publication of a biography of Salinger because it was baseO Part on unauthorized use of Bis-unpublished letters to friends. By-LLIE HANSCOM Newsday Since the death of Howard Hufchgs Salinger is our of mystery, outranked only 3S? Greta Garbo as the recluse inti yhose privacy we would most like; nose. SefiSger is a writer whose authorize! EJhon of published work consist one short novel and four worksof shorter fiction (although theH2fre other stories in print if anyboTty wants to hunt them up in anient1 copies of The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post). Nothing more has appeared in the last 22 years.

During that time, he has lived in a smalCtown in New Hampshire apparently in much the same way he was living a quarter century ago when, at the top of his vogue, Time magazine put him on its cover. He was then sharing his modest home with a wife from whom he was later divorced, but the story described him as a dropout from society who would break into a run if addressed by a stranger on the street When Alfred Kazin published an essay on him in The Atlantic in 1961, it was entitled "J.D. Salinger. Everybody's Favorite." That was at just abtyitihe time the mania for his work reached its peak. While it last- OUTBREAK By Rotiii) Cook Putnam 966 pp.

$17.95 In Robin Cook's latest medical thriller, "Outbreak," a mysterious fatal disease begins to strike at various medical clinics throughout the United States. Teams from the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, aretSpatched to investigate. Invariably! they find that they're dealing witty a hemorrhagic fever caused by the'most deadly virus known to man." Tey contain the damage through THE MAGICIAN'S GIRL By joris Grumbach Macjrtillan 224 pp. $16.95 Though the idea of a novel about a cohort of college classmates beckons alluringly to American writers, fewrmount the built-in hazards as gradefully as Doris Grumbach does here. She limits her group to three uncommon women, not one of whom is either a type or a cliche.

And, she concentrates upon each at a different stage of life, so we're spared the familiar redundancies of undergraduate tribulations and sophdmore romance. Gjumbach gives us only the essentials of these Interconnected nothing extraneous or irrelevant to her highly particular There is, at the core of a life histqry, an inscrutable enigma no bi-ograpjier, friend or novelist can solve' These fundamental riddles linger to lift this thoughtful novel out bf the usual mold, leaving the reader pondering their ambiguities; concerned with the characters long after the last page. The first girl we encounter is Minna Grant as an overprotected living comfortably in mid-towrf Manhattan in the 1930s. Even then Minna is an independent spirit outwardly conforming to her parents; constraints while quietly developing! a 'ill of steel. trUth and lies in lterature By Stephen Vizinczey Selections and introduction by Christopher, Sinclair-Stevenson Atlantic Monthly Press $16.95 The great Samuel Johnson considered', it a compliment when he called a man "a very good hater." Johnson's phrase can well be applied lo Stephen Vizinczey, whose hatred of tyranny (even the tyranny we sctmetlmes consciously or unconsciously impose upon ourselves) oveelthe mind, spirit and body of man'Kind is well founded indeed.

Bom in Hungary in 1933, Vizinczey whs 2 when his father, headmaster of; a district school and a prominent" -anti-fascist, was assassinated by atoazi fanatic. Three of Vizinc-zey's plays were later banned by the Communist regime in Hungary. He fought the Hungarian revolution 1951 FILE PHOTO Reclusive author J.O. Salinger hasn't published in 22 years. ed and the phenomenon has hardly been repeated since it was possible to see people actually queuing up at bookstores to buy out early copies of a book.

The book that made this sensation In 1961 was "Franny and Zooey," a pair of stories that, oddly enough, already had been published in The New Yorker. It made no difference. Salinger didn't just have readers; he had followers, who wanted to, own what they already had read. He had made his first great splash 10 years before with his one novel, "The Catcher in the Rye." This was one of those works of imagination (Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" is the earliest example that comes to mind) that speaks with devastating force to the young of a particular generation. It is the story of Holden Caulfield, a preppie teen-ager absconding from his boarding school because he can't tolerate the phoniness.

If the quarantine, and when they discover that most of the index cases the initial identifiable case in each outbreak involve ophthalmologists who have recently attended a convention in San Diego, they assume they have matters under control. Dr. Marissa Blumenthal, a newcomer to the Centers for Disease Control, thinks otherwise. She sees a deeper pattern: that the index cases are all foreign doctors, that all have been mugged shortly before contracting the fever, that someone or something doesn't want her exploring any deeper. Off she goes, digging anyway, 100 pounds of pert but As a teen-ager, she acquires a passion for swimming, for pushing herself to the limits of endurance, fascinated by the recent triumph of Gertrude Ederle.

Just as suddenly, she becomes disenchanted, perhaps at the sad spectacle of her heroine, "strapping, muscular, flat-footed, thick-hipped," lending her name and endorsement to the manufacturers of Flit a popular insect repellent even then the butt of jokes. Thereafter, Minna swims only to test herself, plunging into the ocean as if it were her enemy, "the sum total of her fears, the cumulative phobia that canceled out the fading pleasure of her youth and made itself part of the ferocious and threatening world around her." A crucial lesson has been learned, and by the time she enters Barnard College life has caught up with her, temporarily subduing her rebellious spirit. She marries a dear, dull man and slips out of the novel's foreground. Maud Mary Noon usurps the empty place, holding It for much of the book. Though we also see her first as a child of 5, Maud's background contrasts sharply with Minna's.

Her father is a career Army man, away so much Maud is hardly aware of his presence. Her older brother, Spencer, fills that gap, buffering the homely, myopic, overweight girl from the indifference of their mother, a hard-working woman so utterly obsessed with physical perfection of 1956 and sometime after escaped to the West In Canada, England and the United States, he forged a new life and an enviable new reputation as a novelist essayist and critic. "Truth and Lies in Literature" is a collection of Vizinczey's essays and journalistic writings, 1968-1985. To put it mildly, he is one critic who is no friend to critics that is, to establishment critics (and authors). Although pompous and reactionary, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869), "the founder of modern French literary criticism," was immensely learned and immensely respected in his day.

However, in his title essay Vizinczey uses Sainte-Beuve as a kind of prototype of all the deadliest examples of the breed the "failed artists," "envious mediocrities and phonies," with the need to appear calm and impartial "while seething with hatred and spite or trembling with the excitement of making and breaking reputations yet, always lavish with nology. The scariest scenes occur in a maximum-containment lab full of frozen samples of "every pathological virus known to man." Marissa keeps sneaking into it with various malefactors in cold but violent pursuit. Whatever the explanation, by the time we've figured out what's going on, it's too late to stop. So slickly has Cook polished every obvious twist of Marissa's adventures that by the time we've slid into them, our momentum carries us clear through to the other side. Reviewed by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.

New York Times News Service not quite powerful enough to counteract despair. Liz Becker grows up in Greenwich Village, the child of eccentric and symbiotic political radicals. When her parents lose teaching jobs, they retrench not only financially but emotionally. "Affection, like oxygen in a sickroom, was meted out among the Beckers in very small doses. What there was of it to Liz's mind, was reserved by her parents for each other." For Liz, as for Maud, the vacuum is filled by a surrogate her grandmother, a vital and loving connection abruptly severed by a bizarre, horrible street accident Though we glimpse Liz from time to time in relation to Maud and Minna and bear about her increasingly successful career as a photographer, Maud and Minna dominate the novel.

One of the book's many ironies is that while Liz not only becomes the actual survivor but the woman whose life might once have been considered unconventional, she seems the least vibrant and memorable of the three. The fact that no one in this book is ever quite synchronized in time or place gives "The Magician's Girl" a special tension; an asymmetry far more original and provocative than the contrived balance a less daring writer would offer. Reviewed by Elaine Kendall. The Los Angeles Times Of Stendhal, Vizinczey writes: "He fought with the world like an ardent lover with his mistress none of her real or imagined slights could prevent him from loving her with all his heart if Stendhal's world is dominated by lovers, Dostoevsky's dominant characters are ravers bullies, tyrants and terrorists. A most topical author," he adds wryly.

Yet he praises Dostoevsky's dark prophetic vision, asserting that "if he has the courage of his despair in rejecting the possibility of Utopia, he softens the horror of foul passions and deeds by placing the possibility of redemption within everybody's reach." Vizinczey touches briefly or at length on a broad range of other subjects, from feminist Kate Millett to Norman Mailer, Herman Melville and the Mafia; from Christianity to Communism; from Russian revolutionaries to Robert Kennedy. Reviewed by Josef Dlgnan, a Louisville free-lance writer. indomitable medical detective. It doesn't take long to figure out what's going on in "Outbreak" who the good and bad guys are, and why. Tracking Marissa's adventures, Cook tries to keep her "thoroughly confused as to what was intelligent deduction and what paranoid delusion," but many readers may find her just a little on the stupid side.

Maybe that's the novel's appeal that we can feel so superior to Or maybe it's the story's pertinence to the subject of AIDS, or the command that Cook, a physician by training, continues to command over the wonders of medical tech Doris Grumbach, author of "The Magician's Girl." that the annual Atlantic City Miss America pageant becomes the focal point of her life. Strong, handsome, athletic and kind, Spencer contracts polio and eventually succumbs to pneumonia. With his death, Maud is cast adrift, thrown on the mercy of the world. Hopelessly lacking in beauty, she is an unlikely candidate for romance. But her acute, quirky intelligence fascinates an attractive Columbia student who marries her because her homeliness matches an obscure need in his personality.

For a short time, their neuroses mesh, but after siring twin sons, Luther abandons Maud, leaving her with the little boys, a severely damaged self-image and her gift for poetry, praise for books written by or written for people close to the government." Even Charles Dickens comes in for a somewhat milder reproof. "It seemed to me," Vizinczey writes, "from a literary world presided over by the secret police, that Dickens wasn't very different from a successful Soviet writer in his novels as in Soviet literature, the truly high and mighty have only private vices: they are not shown to be evil in the exercise of their political and social functions." Vizinczey has a special affinity with underdogs and, particularly, with great writers who were poorly paid, shabbily treated and either ignored or thrashed by critics in their lifetimes. Among these are Stendhal; Dostoevsky; Mary Wollstone-craft (1759-1797), author of "A Vindication of the Rights of and the tragic poet-playwright Hein-rich von Kleist (1777-1811), driven to suicide by repeated failures. pis? 5m Bin mm I JkJ All the stories are readable and rewarding, but several stand out with distinction. Madison Smartt Bell's "Triptych 2" is a superb account of a hog-killing, rich in realistic and symbolic detail.

Wallace Whatley's "Some-. thing to Lose" is a haunting tribute; to an old woman who lost her only-son in World War II. Gloria Norris' "Holding On" introduces a woman' who, after 38 years of marriage'" doesn't have "one single thing wanted" and decides to declare her independence by opening a side-' yard cafe. One of the best-crafted stories lsl by University of Louisville professor Leon V. Driskell, whose "MarthaVh' Jean" is a man's recounting of how he gradually fell in love with a home-town Georgia girl obsessed.

with gouging out soft-drink bottle' caps to look for prize-winning num bers. Martha Jean Foley, who never i wore makeup and dreamed of a ca- reer in "Christian Education," failed to win any big prizes except the love of an unlikely young man. It is an engaging trip down memory lane; that leads to an unexpected destina- tion. This story, like most of RavenelV' selections, depicts the South as re-, membered fondly yet critically by some of its most talented contempt rary storytellers. They make lasting impressions.

On the other hand, most of the "Stories from the Heartland" easily forgettable. They have little' sense of place and even less vitality. One is set in Hawaii, another in Ni-' geria, but most occur nowhere in particular. Two successful stories are Gordon, Weaver's sketch of a man who seeks ,7. refuge from the frightful cold in Chicago bar and Kelly Barth's par thetic portrait of an aging whose antique family brooch is rev'u vealed to be a fake.

Sena Naslund, who heads the ere-' ative writing program at the Univer-' sity of Louisville, is represented by a brief story of a woman who is at-' tempting to exorcise the memory ofv' her first husband 12 years after their divorce. During their relation-' ship his past has become her Now she recalls him in a series poetic snapshots depicting his youth, adolescence, their courtship, riage and estrangement This is one of the shortest but', most effective pieces in the collec'---, tion. Most of the remaining stories are considerably less successful. Nevertheless, these two anthologies demonstrate that the short story though not as popular as it was is still alive and doing reasonably well, particularly in the South. Reviewed by Wade Hall, professor, of English at Bellarmine College.

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