Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 22

"-i i an 4 Sid? Cri k-ui Wui ur ti 12 DETROIT FREE PRESS SUNDAY, APRIL 6 1900 63 a fl a is HQ rrn I tiis otow ne IS ver really raid play up ing ll IT' jt' III it ll 'Goldfish is a simple and powerful tale I -A ll IP 11 I yi i )i I IX JUL -v ffS, hi illness, sexuality, and despair. These are topics central to the novel, yet they are woven gently into it. Most of what happens to Carrie a nervous breakdown; the revelation that her close friend, an art teacher, is having an affair is never explicitly stated. The book's power derives from its reliance on feeling. Carrie's emotions, her confusion and sense of loss, her bewilderment at the adult world, are authentic ones and that is how we see them, and feel them.

And yet, Oneal never allows the book to be emotional in tone. Instead, she has written in a laconic style, built on simple declarative sentences, which works to underscore the turbulence within Carrie. ZIBBY ONEAL, a lecturer in the English department at the University of Michigan, is a tall, slender and. graceful woman who has been writing fiction since she was 16. She is 46 now and the mother of two grown children, but when she wrote "The Language of Goldfish," she was 12 because "when you write about a certain age, you feel as if you are that age.

You have to put yourself there." Oneal said, "I hate to talk like this but writing is almost mystical. I was 12 a long time ago, but when you put yourself there, you find yourself thinking and writing things that are very mysterious. They just come." She originally Intended to write a comic novel, she said, "but the book took on its own shape. Many of the things I. had planned to be in it aren't.

It changed as I wrote." The first reviews of the book, she said, have talked about the touchy subjects in her book, a point she believes is silly. "I don't see any reason to lie to kids and I didn't see any way to write the book other than to do it honestly," she said, talking in the den In her Ann Arbor home. She wanted to write about the phoniness and artificiality of suburbia, she said to show how upsetting it can be for a child in the process of growing up to confront and accept parts of life "that one is rightfully disturbed by." "THE LANGUAGE of Goldfish" took Oneal five years to write because she wrote large sections, then put it away. "I quit sometimes. I wanted to quit often," she said.

"I wondered why I was spending my time doing something that caused me so much pain. "There are a lot of newnesses that have to be faced growing up," she said. "You have to leave the security of what you know, and relinquishing can cause a great deal of pain." "The Language of Goldfish" is about pain and anxiety and loss; and it offers its young readers no easy answers or solutions. Carrie Stokes is a character with great emotional integrity have to be myself," she says at one point, refusing to lie about her nervous breakdown, as her parents urge her to do), which is both her strength and the weakness that allows her to be overwhelmed by everything she knows isn't right. "The Language of Goldfish" is a remarkable book.

For her part, Zibby Oneal admits almost shyly, and as simply and as truthfully as she wrote it, that she loves the book. It would be surprising if most readers don't feel the same way. Laura Berman Free Press Staff Writer THE LANGUAGE OF GOLDFISH by Zlbby Oneal (Viking, $8.95) Most books for young adults don't get read by older ones but "The Language of Goldfish," a novel by an Ann Arbor woman named Zibby Oneal, is almost certain to be an exception. The book's publisher apparently thinks so too, since advance reading copies were sent to reviewers for the first time in the history of Viking Junior Books. Viking was also the publisher of Judith Guest's "Ordinary People," the bestseller with which 'The Language of Goldfish" will probably be compared because of the similarity of subject matter, publisher and authors (both authors were unknowns, with Michigan backgrounds).

Oneal's book is a simple and quietly powerful story of a 12-year-old girl, Carrie Stokes, who lives in a Chicago suburb where she and her family have recently moved. Carrie is sensitive, bright and talented. She's an aspiring artist and a whiz at math. "The Language of Goldfish" is about Carrie's passage from childhood to adolescence, and the anxiety and sense of dislocation that passage brings. IT IS a book for young adults only because of the simplicity of the language and the subtlety with which Oneal treats the subjects of mental "I don't sec any reason to lie to kids and I didn't sec any way to write the book other than to do it honestly," author Zibby Oneal said, talking in the den in her Ann Arbor home.

Free Press photo by WILLIAM ARCHIE He fought his heart and won four years Daibaia Holliday books attack. But neither would some of its most excruciating incidents learning that bypass surgery probably did more damage than good, watching brain damage destroy Hal's once-sharp mind so that he could not find his way around the block. Hal's legacy, his wife says, is his love of life, his willingness to fight to make it good. But how far? Most of us, I suspect, would have given up long before Hal Lear. Perhaps that's why his story is so compelling.

Marcia Abramson Free Press Staff Writer me of a child stalling at bedtime. But this is the ultimate bedtime and he refuses to say good "night." About the medical profession: Though Mrs. Lear remains confident Hal was receiving good treatment from fine doctors, the mistakes are still frightening. About dying from heart disease not from a quick heart attack, but a slow, painful, ugly death. HAL LEAR fought to have those last four years.

Were they worth the suffering? Martha Lear thinks so. Her book would not exist if Hal had succumbed to his first massive heart Hal Lear; some tried to tell the truth, others did not. Although he was a doctor, Hal did not escape evasive answers and patronizing attitudes. The treatment Martha got was even worse. Hal soon learned to double-check everything that was done to him; with his last words he asked for his notebook, where he kept careful records of his symptoms and therapy.

"HEARTSOUNDS" will make many readers cry; but it will also make them think. About Hal's courage, and his wife's. I like best the way she describes him at the end: "He reminds his genes; none of his male relatives had hearts strong enough to carry them to age 60. Hal tried to fight back by keeping in shape, watching his diet (though he couldn't quit smoking). Perhaps that bought him four extra years, after he had a massive heart attack at 53.

Those years gave him time to make a good marriage better, to know his children, to watch a baby grandson grow. But they were agonizing. Lear had so little heart function, he could barely move; doctors said only willpower was keeping him alive. Doctors said a lot of things about HEARTSOUNDS by Martha Wein-man Lear (Simon Schuster, $12.95) Other people have died, sadly and bravely, in true-life and made-up stories: So what makes Hal Lear special? The answer must be the way his wife tells his story their story. Martha Weinman Lear, a writer by profession, has turned her love for Hal Into her best work, a remarkable account of his last years.

HAL LEAR was a doctor, and he knew a heart attack was lurking in A feminine survivor and a vindictive old man EX (v IlliliSllllBlit What's your fancy La Belle Epoque or Edwardian England? Take your choice. By interesting happenstance, two top-notch biographies of writers (who may eventually occupy only footnotes in the literary history of the 20th Century) have been published almost concurrently. The subjects could hardly be more different: Colette, the quintessential French woman, writing purely from the center of her feminine (if ever-so-slightly perverse) soul and sensuality, and Somerset Maugham, the quintessential English gentleman who desperately sought all his life to conceal his homosexuality. They were born only a year apart Colette in 1 873, Maugham in 1 874 and both lived long lives crowned with signal acclaim in their field. Colette died peacefully in 1954 at 8 1 Maugham 11 ved his final years in piteous senile dementia, to die finally in 1965 at 91.

MAUGHAM read and admired Colette, enough to almost steal the plot of her novel "Cherl" for his 1937 novel, "Theatre." For a time they were neighbors on the Maugham's biographer writes: "Maugham; found Colette's ease of expression so formidable that he could not believe she took any trouble over it and was surprised when she told him that she often spent a whole morning on a single page." i There is no mention of Maugham in the Colette biography. One presumes she dismissed him with a sniff. The other thing these biographies have in common is that so much has already been written about the subjects (by themselves as well as others), that one wonders what's possibly left. Plenty. COLETTE by Michele Sarde, translated by Richard Miller (Morrow, $12.95) Sarde uses Colette's own words to illumi- MAUGHAM by Ted Morgan (Simon Schus-ter, $17.95) Maugham was not a likeable man, nor did he like people.

He was so determined to keep his life private, even after his death, that he burned all of his own correspondence and ordered his friends to do the same. Fortunately, for his biographer, few, if any, complied with Maugham's demand. Maugham was a prodigious letter writer, responding to every note he received and keeping a constant flow of correspondence going out. Ted Morgan traveled widely, haunted libraries, and traced down private collections to assemble the pieces of a strange, and finally, desolate life. One almost winces reading this excellent biography, which fans Maugham's life out like a bridge hand, knowing how much he would detest it.

"He was," writes Morgan, "the best known English writer in the world, but in his heart he knew that he was second-best." Long before his death, critics had dismissed him as a formula writer, a hack, whose work included nothing memorable. Readers of a certain persuasion who remember "Of Human Bondage," "Cakes and Ale" or even "The Razor's Edge" may feel this is much too harsh an assessment for a writer who was, if nothing else, a superb storyteller. What is unfortunate is that he was such a miserable human being, vindictive and caddish. His primary concern was his reputation. He feared the disclosure of his homosexuality, and Morgan speculates that this fear may have indeed hampered his writing.

Bobby Mather Free Press Special Writer Reaching the kids sin, the 1800s, stripped buildings SOME OF THE best authors in the land choose to write for children. These writers are interesting, witty and wise. And since the money for authoring children's books is often negligible, in contrast to other areas of publishing, the authors' motives are likely to be purer than most. Last week, the 1980 Newbery Award winner, Joan Bios of Ann Arbor, and two seasoned authors, Natalie Babbitt and David Macaulay, spoke at the BirminghamBloomfield Children's Book and Author luncheon to several hundred lucky listeners. BABBITT, WHO is crisp, concise and can think circles around most of us, said she writes out of her own Now, she said, she is thinking about the concept of original sin.

Childhood and original sin? She related two anecdotes which any child would understand. "We lived next door to a Methodist minister whose daughter stole some of our doll's underwear," she said. "Now that's a real moral dilemma. Mother didn't believe the minister's daughter would do such a thing. Now we come to a question of justice and the rule we heard each week at Sunday School to love thy neighbor.

Who was really guilty? The minister's daughter for stealing, or me, for not being able to forgive? That sounds silly now but it was very real then. "Into the life of my older sister when she started first grade came Norma Jean Bagley. Small and mean. Everyday she chased my sister home trying to pinch her. Now if there was one rule we were brought up by, it was to never hit someone smaller.

And Norma Jean was smaller than my sister, who was therefore helpless. I watched this going on every afternoon from the front porch, and I could see how it was going to end. Norma Jean was not smaller than me." There's an author you can trust. Or as Babbitt puts it: "The moral structure of our society is very complicated, and some of us never get it straightened outJ Fantasy is very real to me. The kind that softens the edges of difficult questions and gives us a universal language." i Babbitt's books include "Kneenock Rise," "Tuck Everlasting," "The Search for Delicious" and her most recent, "The Eyes of the Amaryllis." JOAN BLOS, of the University of Michigan College of Education, specializes in children's literature.

She won the Newbery Award, given by the American Library Association, for 'A Gathering of the diary of a 13-year-old girl living on a New Hampshire farm in the early 1800s. Bios says she plans to write several sequels "because the 1800s were such a yeasty time in American history." She says that if she could say everything she wished to children it would be: Don't be scared; make your life matter, and don't waste it. That advice, as a matter of fact, can be found in a letter at the beginning of the book. DAVID MACAULAY, English-born, uses his degree in architecture to create the intricate and accurate drawings of the structure of things in such books as "Cathedral," "Pyramid," "Underground" and "Castle." One of the most amusing books to come out at Christmas last year was his spoof of the discovery of King Tutankhamen's tomb, "Motel of the Mysteries." When you mention it, he fastens you with a stern eye and says, "That was a serious book. When I think of all the research He said he would explain why he did what he did "because it is much easier to think about what you did after you've done it." "Because I understand architecture, I can use it as a tool to get people to look," he said.

"When I see a man-made structure, I mentally unbuild it and put it back together. "Hopefully, I can then encourage you to look at all kinds of things that way, understanding orderly succession, logic, gravity. If it's not built properly, it won't stand up." He has just finished his newest book, "The Unbuilding," to be released In the fall. What has he unbuilt? Why the most recognizable American landmark of all the Empire State building. "I made some trade-offs," he said, "to keep from offending New Yorkers.

I put a nice park on the site." His next project is the human body. "It's truly amazing," he said, with the wonder of someone who understands the structure of things. "It was never meant to stand up." Hf I lift WMi Wt 'AIM NiBlfiTihnli IllilllJ' vJIV Colette wrote so touchingly about after Sido's death died and was buried without Colette's presence. Nor does she find'it especially strange that Colette in effect shut her own daughter out of her life. Is this "the cord stretched in its unbroken continuity," Sarde writes? With Colette, one senses, it was always Colette or the reflection she saw of herself in the eyes of others that mattered.

Sarde writes in her foreword, "I was first attracted to her because she was such an average woman." Some "average woman." But she was a survivor. nate the story of her life, an immensely effective device. Here it all is again: the provincial tomboy girlhood, the superlative mother, Sido; the premature marriage to the detestable Willy who not only signed his name to her early books but blithely appropriated the thus stealing a small fortune the "Claudine" books earned. And the lesbian affair with' butchy "Missy," the Marquise de Belbeuf, and a perceptive view of that segment of pre-World, War I Paris when girls could indeed be girls. Sarde is strongly feminist in her interpretation of Colette's life, yet seems strangely unconcerned that Colette's mother whom best-sellers melodramatic Identity crisis new in the stores 'Crooked Tree' MASS MARKET PAPERBACKS 1.

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