The New York Times, by Michiko Kakutani

By Michiko Kakutani

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACK MAN
By Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Illustrated. 226 pages. Random House $22

The title of Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s eloquent new book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, is, of course, a play on the Wallace Stevens poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and Mr. Gates uses the phrase both to pose an epistemological problem, as Stevens did, and to raise some vexing questions about identity and race. Indeed, the central theme running through these otherwise disparate profiles is a variation on the one that Ralph Ellison addressed in "Invisible Man": how does race heighten the perennial American question of self-definition; how does it, in effect, color both white perceptions of blacks, and black perceptions of self?

In this volume, the versatile Mr. Gates, who is the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities and chairman of the Afro-American studies department at Harvard University, is writing in his journalistic mode. "Thirteen Ways" does not aspire to the scholarly latitudes of Mr. Gates's first book, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism; it is closer, in tone and style, to "Colored People," his engaging 1994 memoir.

In contrast to literary criticism, Mr. Gates suggests, "writing a profile is in part an exercise in toning down your stentorian certainties; people benefit from a slightly more gingerly approach than texts." Once "you start approaching people as cultural homework," he adds, "you'd better hang it up."

In writing about eight prominent black Americans (James Baldwin, Albert Murray, Bill T. Jones, Colin Powell, O. J. Simpson, Louis Farrakhan, Harry Belafonte and Anatole Broyard), Mr. Gates not only displays his fluency and charm as an essayist but also shows off his skills as a reporter. His portrait of General Powell, which originally appeared in The New Yorker, includes some remarkably candid quotes from the Rev. Jesse Jackson about his rivalry with the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and also situates that rivalry within a tradition of contrasting power pairs in African-American history: Henry Highland Garnet and Frederick Douglass; W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington; Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Other profiles read more like short stories: artful narratives about kinship and competition, succinct parables about the invention and loss of identity. One chapter traces the nearly 50-year friendship of Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, their fluctuating fortunes within the movie business and their respective attitudes toward politics. Another depicts the equally long association between Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, including their literary and philosophical nurturance of each other, their mysterious estrangement in the 70's and their eventual rapprochement.

The chapter on James Baldwin charts his sheepish repudiation of his earlier views in a vain effort to appease his radical critics, while the chapter on Anatole Broyard, who was a book critic for The New York Times, relates the paradoxical story of a man who repudiated his racial heritage in an effort to forge an identity as a writer, and who in the process misplaced the ability to finish the magnum opus he'd always wanted to write.

Although Mr. Gates pulls no punches in these pieces -- of Baldwin's efforts to ingratiate himself with a younger generation of radicals, he writes: "It read as weakness, the ill-disguised appeasement of a creature whose day had come and gone" -- he tempers his assessments with a sympathetic intelligence and a determination to see the larger implications of his subjects' stories. He also leavens his analysis with personal asides and ruminations that sketch in his own efforts to grapple with the issue of race.

Mr. Gates tells us about the ambivalent feelings he experienced as a Yale student in the late 60's being asked for donations from the Panthers: "You handed them money because they were working for a better tomorrow; because they were strong, proud and black; because they had a wardrobe you could only dream about; because if you dared to walk past them, they'd demand, 'Where you gonna be when the revolution comes, handkerchief-head?' and images of the tumbrel would pass before your eyes."

He tells us about the ill-founded expectations he brought to a visit to Louis Farrakhan's house for the first time: "I wasn't expecting the Death Star, exactly, but I wouldn't have been surprised to see a formidable security detail: the Fruit of Islam patrolling the roof and gates with automatic weapons; perhaps a few attack dogs roaming the grounds."

And he tells us about the impact that Watts had on him at the age of 14, when news of the riots reached his integrated summer camp: watching himself being watched by all the white campers, he says, he "experienced that strange combination of power and powerlessness that you feel when the actions of another black person affect your own life, simply because you both are black."

In essay after essay in this volume, questions of authenticity (of being black enough) and "the burden of representation" ("the homely notion that you represent your race, thus that your actions can betray your race or honor it") surface as issues in the lives of Mr. Gates's subjects. General Powell is quoted as saying he doesn't want "to be the poster child for the brothers, or for guilty white liberals." Harry Belafonte, hailed by Look magazine in 1957 as "the first Negro matinee idol in our entertainment history," finds himself resenting his status as a "bridge Negro" while at the same time receiving rebukes from blacks for marrying a white woman.

As for O. J. Simpson, Mr. Gates argues that he became "an empty vessel" filled with meaning by blacks and whites alike who refused to see his case as sui generis and instead "racialized" it, turning it into yet another chapter in the "binary discourse of accusation and counteraccusation, of grievance and countergrievance, of victims and victimizers" that has dominated the analysis of race in this country.

Each man in this book, Mr. Gates observes, rages in his own way "against the dread requirement to represent; against the demands of 'authenticity,' " but at the same time, all are "people who have borne some freight of being iconic."

"Railing against something doesn't mean you've escaped from it," he writes. "The grand theme of your career may be that the burden of representation is an illusion -- a paradigm, par excellence, of ideological mauvaise foi -- but that will only heighten your chagrin when you realize that it follows you everywhere like your own shadow. It isn't a thing of your making, and it won't succumb to your powers of unmaking -- not yet, anyway."

© 1997, The New York Times Company

By Michiko Kakutani

[A] nearly impenetrable narrative, filled with digressions, narcissistic asides and ridiculous shaggy-dog circumlocutions.

So, at long last, we have news that the famously reclusive J. D. Salinger is bringing out another book, not a new story, but one called "Hapworth 16, 1924," which appeared in The New Yorker in the 1960's. Read in retrospect, that story continues -- perhaps even completes -- the saga of the Glass family, that band of precocious, high-strung whiz kids who have captivated Salinger fans for four decades. It also stands as a logical, if disappointing, culmination of Mr. Salinger's published work to date.

Why wait three decades to bring out this story in book form? And why choose the obscure Orchises Press in Alexandria, Va., to publish it? One can only speculate: that the author wanted to remind his readers of his existence, that he wanted to achieve a kind of closure by putting his last published story between book covers, that he wanted readers to reappraise the Glass family (and by extension his body of work) through a story that, within the Glass canon, is nothing less than revisionistic.

As with most things connected with Mr. Salinger, an air of mystery hovers about the publication of "Hapworth." His agent has not returned phone calls, and even bookstores say they do not know exactly when they will have copies of the book for sale, this month, perhaps, or March or April. In the meantime, the story can be found in the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker -- in the library stacks or on microfilm.

The New Yorker story, a novella really, takes the form of a nearly interminable letter ostensibly written from summer camp by the 7-year-old Seymour Glass. It is unlikely to be of any interest to anyone who has not closely followed the emotional peregrinations of the Glass family over the years, and for ardent Glass-ites, it is likely to prove a disillusioning, if perversely fascinating, experience. An experience that will forever change their perception of Seymour and his siblings.

Like Holden Caulfield, the Glass children are both avatars of adolescent angst and emblems of Mr. Salinger's own alienated stance toward the world. Bright, gregarious and entertaining (their parents are retired vaudevillians), the Glasses embody all the magic of their creator's early stories; they appeal to the reader to identify with their sensitivity, their braininess, their impatience with phonies, hypocrites and bores.

The Glasses' emotional translucence, their febrile charm, their spiritual yearning and nausea -- all delivered in the wonderfully idiomatic voice of cosmopolitan New Yorkese -- initially made them a glamorous mirror of our own youthful confusions. Yet there is a darker side to their estrangement as well: a tendency to condescend to the vulgar masses, a familial self-involvement that borders on the incestuous and an inability to relate to other people that, in Seymour's case at least, will have tragic consequences indeed.

Seymour, of course, was the oldest of the Glass children, who in the 1948 short story "A Perfect Day for Ba nanafish" (collected in "Nine Stories") put a gun to his head and blew his brains out. In that story, Seymour appeared to be a sweet if somewhat disturbed young man, ill equipped to deal with the banal, grown-up world represented by his frivolous wife.

In subsequent stories, we learned, largely through the reminiscences of his brother Buddy -- the family historian and Mr. Salinger's alter ego, who actually purports to have written "Bananafish" and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" (1955) -- that Seymour was regarded as the family saint and resident mystic. In "Seymour: An Introduction" (1959), Buddy described his brother as "our blue-striped unicorn, our double-lensed burning glass, our consultant genius, or portable conscience, our supercargo and our one full poet." Seymour was the one who inculcated the younger Glasses in Eastern mysticism and Western philosophy and preached a Zen-like doctrine of acceptance. Seymour was the one who said that "all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next." Seymour was supposed to be the one who saw more.

It is something of a shock, then, to meet the Seymour presented in "Hapworth": an obnoxious child given to angry outbursts. "No single day passes," this Seymour writes, "that I do not listen to the heartless indifferences and stupidities passing from the counselors' lips without secretly wishing I could improve matters quite substantially by bashing a few culprits over the head with an excellent shovel or stout club!"

This Seymour confesses to lustful feelings about the camp matron ("I have looked forward with mounting pleasure to the possibility, all too slight for words, of her opening the door, quite unwittingly, in the raw"), condescends to his parents ("Jesus, you are a talented, cute, magnificent couple!") and boasts of his own talent ("the distinguished Edgar Semple having told Mr. Fraser that I have the makings of a splendid American poet, which is quite true in the last analysis").

For a child, Seymour makes requests for reading material that verge on the preposterous: among many other books, he asks for "the complete works again of Count Leo Tolstoy" and "any unbigoted or bigoted books on God or merely religion, as written by persons whose last names begin with any letter after H; to stay on the safe side, please include H itself, though I think I have mostly exhausted it."

Though Seymour and his siblings have always been renowned for their precocity, this hardly sounds like a 7-year-old, no matter how brilliant or advanced. After all, Buddy told us in an earlier story that when Seymour was 8, he was writing poems like this: "John Keats/John Keats/John/ Please put your scarf on."

Indeed, there are plenty of suggestions that Buddy -- who introduces the Hapworth letter, saying he's typed "an exact copy" of Seymour's words -- is actually the letter's author, distorting Seymour in much the same way that he once said he distorted Seymour in "Bananafish," impersonating a brother through an act of ventriloquism as Zooey did in the 1957 story "Zooey." It is never explained, for instance, why Seymour, once described as "the least prolific letter writer in the family," has penned such a ludicrously long epistle. Equally unexplained are the bizarre hints in the letter that Seymour can foretell the future, that he has predicted, at such a young age, his own untimely death and Buddy's dazzling future as a writer.

Why would Buddy Glass want to distort his brother's memory, tear down the myth of the saintly Seymour he has so carefully constructed in the past? No doubt one possible motive lies in the Glass siblings' resentment of Seymour's mentorship and sanctimonious love of perfection and their bitterness over his suicide, which left the "Whole Loving Family high and dry." Buddy, especially, has always had a deeply ambivalent relationship with his older brother, his professed love and adoration belying, in "Seymour: An Introduction" at least, envy, pique and simple weariness with being haunted by a ghost.

In the end, of course, Buddy is a fictional narrator, a mouthpiece for his creator, and so the larger question becomes, what light does "Hapworth" shed on Mr. Salinger's conception of the Glasses and the evolution of his art?

The first thing the reader notices, in looking back on the Glass stories, is that the tales have grown increasingly elliptical over the years, tidily crafted works like "Bananafish" and "Franny" giving way to the increasingly verbose "Zooey" and the shapeless, mock stream of consciousness employed in "Seymour" and "Hapworth." The second thing one notices is that the stories have also grown increasingly self-conscious and self-reflexive, much the way many of Philip Roth's later fictions have. This solipsism, in turn, makes the reader increasingly aware of the solipsism of the Glass family itself, underscoring the rarefied, self-enclosed air of all the stories they inhabit.

"Seymour," which teasingly conflates Buddy's and Mr. Salinger's identities, is filled with little gibes against critics with tin ears, defensive remarks about being a literary entertainer with "surface charms," and even allusions to rumors about being a recluse. "Hapworth" can similarly be read as a response of sorts to Mr. Salinger's critics, who in the years before its New Yorker publication took his Glass stories to task for being too cute, too self-involved, too smug.

In fact, with "Hapworth," Mr. Salinger seems to be giving critics a send-up of what he contends they want. Accused of writing only youthful characters, he has given us a 7-year-old narrator who talks like a peevish old man. Accused of never addressing the question of sexual love, he has given us a young boy who speaks like a lewd adult. Accused of loving his characters too much, he has given us a hero who's deeply distasteful. And accused of being too superficially charming, he has given us a nearly impenetrable narrative, filled with digressions, narcissistic asides and ridiculous shaggy-dog circumlocutions.

In doing so, however, Mr. Salinger has not only ratified his critics' accusations of solipsism, but also fulfilled his own fear that one day he might "disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms." This falling off in his work, perhaps, is a palpable consequence of Mr. Salinger's own Glass-like withdrawal from the public world: withdrawal feeding self-absorption and self-absorption feeding tetchy disdain.

The infinitely engaging author of "The Catcher in the Rye" (1951), the writer who captured the hearts of several generations with his sympathetic understanding, his ear for vernacular speech, his pitch-perfect knowledge of adolescence and, yes, his charm, has produced, with "Hapworth," a sour, implausible and, sad to say, completely charmless story.

© 1997, The New York Times Company

By Michiko Kakutani

UTOPIA PARKWAY
The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell
By Deborah Solomon
Illustrated. 426 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.

With his famous shadow boxes, Joseph Cornell took the flotsam of daily life -- cheap wine glasses, broken dolls, tiny medicine bottles, rusting thimbles, old cork stoppers and paper cutouts -- and invested them with the luminous permanence of art.

In works like "Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall," "Medici Princess," "Roses des Vents" and "The Hotel Eden," the real is transformed into the surreal, the mundane into the magical: movie stars and paper parrots become iconic deities in Cornell's intimate world; children's toys, talismans of a remembered past. As Deborah Solomonwrites in her sympathetic new biography of Cornell, he "found the sublime at the five-and-dime."

At first glance, Cornell's hermetic life would hardly seem to provide much fodder for a full-fledged biography. The artist, after all, spent almost his entire adult life living with his mother and invalid brother in a modest house on Utopia Parkway in Queens; there were no love affairs in Cornell's life, no lasting artistic collaborations. "Cornell didn't drink," Ms. Solomon writes, "never learned to drive, and, to his regret, died a virgin." After Cornell left his job at a textile studio in Manhattan, he spent most of his days bickering with his mother, feeding the birds in the backyard and waiting for the mailman.

What Ms. Solomon -- the art critic for The Wall Street Journal and the author of "Jackson Pollock: A Biography" -- has done in this elegant volume, however, is to make Cornell's inner life palpably real, enabling us to understand both the autobiographical impulses informing his work and his imaginative transactions. Ms. Solomon does not dwell at length on the dysfunctional aspects of Cornell's life -- his obsessive and highly deferential relationship with his mother, his voyeuristic fascination with young women, his love of objects over people -- but instead uses his fears and frustrations to illuminate the painful sources of his art.

As for Ms. Solomon's appraisal of Cornell's work, she not only debunks the early view of the artist as a witty miniaturist who created glittering toys for grown-ups, but also contests the still popular view of him as a belated French Symbolist, a fellow traveler of the European Surrealists. She does not deny his Symbolist-Surrealist roots, but argues for a broader view, a view that also recognizes his affinities with 19th-century American realists and the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950's. She suggests that Cornell had a formative impact on later artists like Robert Rauschenberg and that in mixing the high and low, the classical and the kitsch, he anticipated the innovations of Pop Art and post-modernism as well.

Though some of Ms. Solomon's arguments verge on hyperbole -- she writes, for instance, that Cornell "can fairly be described as the most undervalued of valued American artists" -- her obvious passion for the artist's work helps her to explicate the mysteries of his elliptical art for the lay reader. She traces the evolution of his boxes and collages from the early, fairy-tale-like creations, featuring princesses and ballerinas and owls, through the more austere Aviary series of the 50's and the brighter, brasher assemblages of the 60's. She also introduces the reader to a lesser known branch of Cornell's art, the odd, experimental films he made over several decades, ranging from collage-pastiches of early Hollywood melodramas to dreamy shorts that followed young women about the streets and parks of Manhattan.

A melody of loss and melancholy nostalgia runs throughout Cornell's oeuvre, and Ms. Solomon traces those emotions to the artist's childhood, one defined by the death of his father and the affliction of his brother, Robert, with cerebral palsy.

At 13, young Cornell was the man of the family, and his feelings of responsibility for his overbearing mother and his siblings would endure the rest of his life along with a sense of inadequacy and guilt. Cornell took care of Robert until his death in 1965 and would subsequently arrange for exhibitions of Robert's drawings -- childlike renderings of bunnies and mice -- alongside his own work.

Unhappy as a child, Cornell worshiped Houdini, that master of illusion and escape, and he would later romanticize the idea of childhood as a shining realm of innocence and purity. As a grown-up, Ms. Solomon says, he remained fearful of adult sexuality and developed a fascination with young women and girls, from long-dead ballerinas like Fanny Cerrito to contemporaries like Susan Sontag, Patty Duke and Joan Collins. In later years, most of those crushes came to sad, pathetic ends: one waitress with whom he became obsessed stole boxes from his garage, and he ended up posting her bond and refusing to testify against her in court.

It is Ms. Solomon's contention that Cornell "was the most autobiographical of artists, obsessively relating his life story -- or lack of one -- in his work," and in the course of this volume, she tries to decode many of his best-known works. She notes that many of his earliest constructions -- pillbox assemblages and dioramas placed under glass bells -- "suggest something sickly, airless and confined: the life of an invalid," be it the physically constricted life of his brother or his own emotionally impoverished existence.

Ms. Solomon reads Cornell's first box, "Soap Bubble Set," as a kind of family portrait, with the four Cornell children symbolized by four cylinder-shaped blocks, and their mother by a wine glass containing an egg. In later works, she suggests, the proliferation of empty goblets and broken pipes hints at sexual impotence and unrequited longing.

By placing seemingly disconnected objects within a box, Cornell was not only claiming them as symbols in his own dream life, but also trying to recapture an imaginary past, preserving the evanescent -- dime store ephemera, magazine and newspaper clippings -- in the unforgiving amber of his art.

© 1997, The New York Times Company

By Michiko Kakutani

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE SON
By Norman Mailer
242 pages. Random House. $22

In recent years, Mr. Mailer has tried to dress his all-too-human subjects, Lee Harvey Oswald and Pablo Picasso, in the garments of heroism. This time he has tried to do the reverse, with equally distressing results.

Perhaps it was inevitable that in this memoir-mad age, Norman Mailer, never a writer exactly known for his lack of hubris, would pen a novel in the form of an autobiography of Jesus.

In an interview sent out by Random House with "The Gospel According to the Son," Mr. Mailer observed that he felt up to the dare of channeling Jesus because his own literary celebrity had endowed him with "a slight understanding of what it's like to be half a man and half something else, something larger."

"Obviously, a celebrity is a long, long, long, long way from the celestial," he said, "but nonetheless it does mean that you have two personalities you live with all the time. One is your simple self, so to speak, which is to some degree still like other people, and then there's the opposite one, the media entity, which gives you power that you usually don't know how to use well. So the parallel was stronger than I realized."

The resulting book is a sort of novelized "Jesus Christ Superstar" starring Jesus as an ambivalent pop star and guru: a silly, self-important and at times inadvertently comical book that reads like a combination of "Godspell," Nikos Kazantzakis's "Last Temptation of Christ" and one of those new, dumbed-down Bible translations, all seasoned with Mr. Mailer's own eccentric views on God and faith and the conservation of spiritual energy.

The narrator of "The Gospel According to the Son" isn't the purposeful Son of God we met in Mark's Gospel or the forgiving Jesus described by Luke. This isn't the garrulous teacher introduced by Matthew, or the Jesus who openly proclaimed his Messiahship in John. Mr. Mailer's Jesus is an altogether more ordinary fellow: petulant, irritable and ravaged by "thoughts of lust," a carpenter who just happened to discover at the age of 30 that he had another calling.

For that matter, everything in this volume is a pale, user-friendly version of what it is in the Bible. Miracles aren't so miraculous here: in the loaves and fishes scene, we're told that Jesus "divided them exceedingly small, until there were a hundred pieces of bread from each loaf" and hundreds of flakes of fish, "a triumph of the Spirit rather than an enlargement of matter." Even Judas is given plausible, human motives for his betrayal: as Mr. Mailer's Jesus tells it, Judas was angry at him for appearing to scorn the poor and for failing to lead a revolt against the Romans.

Throughout "The Gospel According to the Son," Jesus suffers terrible doubts about his role as redeemer and worries about the dissipation of his miracle-working powers as though he were an athlete trying to conserve his energies before an important game. After restoring the daughter of Jairus to life, he wonders: "Had I drawn too deeply upon the powers of the Lord? Would it have been wiser to save His efforts for other matters?"

This Jesus is patronizing about his disciples, sarcastic about his human flock and quick to anger. "So many miracles," he complains, "so little gain." For some reason, he is also extremely sensitive to smells, be it the odor of greed radiated by the Devil, the scent of exhaustion that clings to John the Baptist or Jesus' own sometimes sour breath.

Though Mr. Mailer apparently wants to try to flesh out Jesus as a character by exploring his inner conflicts and oh-so-human problems, these efforts to make him relevant -- combined with the book's flattened-out, New Agey language -- have a way of making him seem less like the historical personage we have come to know as Jesus (never mind the Christian Saviour), than just another chatty cult leader. Sometimes Mr. Mailer's Jesus sounds an awful lot like a guest on Oprah. Sometimes he sounds like Do and Ti (a k a Bo and Peep, Pig and Guinea). And sometimes he sounds like Luke Skywalker, the apprentice Jedi trying to master the Force.

Mr. Mailer's Jesus suffers from repressed memory syndrome. (Although Joseph supposedly told him about his miraculous birth when he was 12, he does not recall the discussion until he is 30.) He complains that his mother doesn't understand him. And he feels conflicted about his identity. ("I felt as if I were a man enclosing another man within.")

To complicate matters further, the first-person narrative takes the sorts of sentiments that followers might think or say about Jesus and puts them in his own mouth. Often he sounds downright boastful.

"I could see how I wanted to be all things to all men," he says. "Each could take from me a separate wisdom. Indeed, I thought: Many roads lead to the Lord."

As for Jesus' Father, He comes across as a weary, withholding Dad. Having died and been resurrected, Jesus says he remains "on the right hand of God." "My Father, however, does not often speak to me," he adds. "Nonetheless, I honor Him. Surely He sends forth as much love as He can offer, but His love is not without limit."

In fact, as Mr. Mailer sees it, this God has had great victories, but He has also had great defeats, like the Holocaust and the death of His son. Mr. Mailer's Jesus further suggests that the words from the Bible "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son that whosoever believed in Him should not perish but have eternal life" were written after the fact to rationalize his death, for God "saw how to gain much from defeat by calling it victory."

No doubt this conception of God as a limited Being striving to do His best against great odds provides Mr. Mailer with a means of explaining the cruelties of history, but his portrait of God is not, essentially, a philosophical one. Rather, it is a novelist's portrait of his hero's father. Indeed Mr. Mailer's Father and Son have a lot in common: both are full of themselves, both are fond of self-dramatization, and both tend to feel put upon by their public responsibilities.

In recent years, Mr. Mailer has tried to dress his all-too-human subjects, Lee Harvey Oswald and Pablo Picasso, in the garments of heroism. This time he has tried to do the reverse, with equally distressing results. In trying to describe Jesus and God as accessible novelistic characters, Mr. Mailer has turned them into familiar contemporary types: he has knocked them off their celestial thrones and turned them into what he knows best, celebrities.

© 1997, The New York Times Company

By Michiko Kakutani

AMERICAN PASTORAL
By Philip Roth
423 pages. Houghton Mifflin Company. $26

Back in 1960, Philip Roth gave a speech in which he argued that American life was becoming so surreal, so stupefying, so maddening, that it had ceased to be a manageable subject for novelists. He argued that real life, the life out of newspaper headlines, was outdoing the imagination of novelists, and that fiction writers were in fact abandoning the effort to grapple with "the grander social and political phenomena of our times" and were turning instead "to the construction of wholly imaginary worlds, and to a celebration of the self."

These remarks -- made even before John F. Kennedy's assassination and the social upheavals of the 60's magnified the surreal quotient of American life -- help illuminate what Tom Wolfe identified (with considerable self-serving hyperbole) in the late 80's as a retreat from realism. They also help explain the direction that Mr. Roth's own fiction has taken over the last three and a half decades, his long obsession with alter egos and mirror games and the transactions between life and art.

In his latest novel, "American Pastoral," however, Mr. Roth does away with -- or nearly does away with -- these narcissistic pyrotechnics to tackle the very subjects he once spurned as unmanageable: namely, what happened to America in the decades between World War II and Vietnam, between the complacencies of the 50's and the confusions of the 60's, 70's and 80's. With the story of Seymour (Swede) Levov, Mr. Roth has chronicled the rise and fall of one man's fortunes and in doing so created a resonant parable of American innocence and disillusion.

The resulting book is one of Mr. Roth's most powerful novels ever, a big, rough-hewn work built on a grand design, a book that is as moving, generous and ambitious as his last novel, "Sabbath's Theater," was sour, solipsistic and narrow.

As Mr. Roth has observed himself, his books tend to "zigzag" between the two poles of his imagination: between the willfully decorous ("Letting Go," "The Ghost Writer") and the willfully outrageous ("Portnoy's Complaint," "Our Gang"), the Jamesian and the Rabelaisian. It's eminently clear that "American Pastoral" belongs to the first category, and it's also clear that its polite, dutiful hero, Seymour Levov, is the opposite number of such flamboyant egotists as Mickey Sabbath.

At the same time, Mr. Roth has taken these two contradictory impulses in himself, and used them to limn two contradictory impulses in American history: the first, embodied by Seymour Levov, representing that optimistic strain of Emersonian self-reliance, predicated upon a belief in hard work and progress; the second, embodied by the Swede's fanatical daughter, Merry, representing the darker side of American individualism, what Mr. Roth calls "the fury, the violence, and the desperation" of "the indigenous American berserk."

Whereas the collision of the prudent and the transgressive, the normal and the Dionysian, has been the source of uproarious comedy in earlier Roth novels, that same collision in "Pastoral" generates a familial -- and generational -- showdown with tragic consequences, one that also becomes a kind of metaphor for America's tumultuous lurch into the second half of the 20th century.

We do not get the details of Seymour's story directly from Mr. Roth, but through the prism of Mr. Roth's favorite hero and mouthpiece, Nathan Zuckerman, the infamous star of the "Zuckerman" trilogy, who, we're told, now lives in seclusion in the New England countryside, his body and spirit ravaged by surgery and cancer.

Nathan, it seems, idolized Seymour in high school. The Swede's success on the athletic field, his goyish good looks, his sweetness of spirit, all combined to make him an all-American hero, a golden boy seemingly blessed with endless good fortune. After high school, he became a marine, married Miss New Jersey of 1949, took over his father's glove business and bought a big old house in the New Jersey countryside.

It turns out, however, that Seymour has become a broken man, all his bright hopes shattered by his daughter, Merry, who in 1968 at the height of anti-Vietnam war protests set off a bomb that killed a man. In Nathan's telling (or reimagining) of Seymour's story, Merry emerges as both a self-righteous Fury, oddly reminiscent of the implacable Lucy Nelson in "When She Was Good," and an exaggerated version of Portnoy and Sabbath, the rebellious child programmed to reject all that her parents' generation holds dear.

As depicted by Mr. Roth (er, Nathan), Seymour comes across as an regular guy -- a kind, forbearing man who unexpectedly finds himself chewed up and spit out by the noisy machinery of history. Such a character might ordinarily seem a little bland, even boring, but Mr. Roth describes him with such authority and insight that he's able to make the Swede's decency as palpable -- and yes, compelling -- as the manic craziness of his earlier creations. Seymour, we realize, is the quintessential innocent, a man whose life has broken into a Before and After, a man who finds himself trapped between the moral certainties of his father and the angry denunciations of his daughter.

Certainly the vexing relationship between fathers and children, and the mind-boggling disparity between one's expectations of the world and its grim reality are perennial issues for Mr. Roth's heroes, but in "Pastoral," they are turned from purely personal dilemmas into broader social ones. We are made to contemplate the demise of the immigrant dream cherished by men like Seymour's father, the souring of the generational struggle during the 60's, and the connections between assimilation and rootlessness and anomie.

Although Mr. Roth sometimes works too hard to turn Seymour into a symbol (he is shown imitating Johnny Appleseed and is compared to John F. Kennedy), although his efforts to encompass three generations of history are occasionally strained, "Pastoral" is far more fluent, far more emotionally tactile than the novel's broader outline suggests. Writing less in anger than in sorrow, Mr. Roth uses his sharp, reportorial eye not to satirize his characters but to flesh them out from within.

Indeed, this book boasts one of the most sensitively observed gallery of people to emerge from a Roth novel in years. In addition to Seymour and his vituperative brother, Jerry, there's their father, Lou, a businessman reminiscent of Mr. Roth's own father in "Patrimony," with "absolutely totalistic notions of what is good and what is right." There's Dawn, the Swede's beautiful wife, a woman who is neither a castrating witch nor a passive doormat -- something of a rare occurrence in recent Roth novels -- but a fully fashioned human being, grieved and perplexed by her daughter's defection. And there is a rich, variegated supporting cast of friends, neighbors and employees, who lend ballast to Seymour's world.

Even Merry -- who at one point is described as "chaos itself" -- turns out to be a complex creature, enigmatic and alarming, but also oddly recognizable: a young woman captive to her emotions, impulsive, rebellious and angry, a girl who in a space of months has exchanged 4-H meet ings for violent political demonstrations. Like her father, thereader struggles to connect the dots in her life, struggles to explain how this cherished daughter of privileged parents could end up a fugitive from justice. But then, that is Mr. Roth's point: that events are not rational, that people are not knowable, that life is not coherent.

In the end, the saga of the Levov family is one of those stories out of the headlines that make the reader's head reel, one of those stories Mr. Roth once characterized as a threat to the novelist's powers of invention. It is his achievement in these pages that he has not only tackled and imaginatively harnessed such a daunting subject but has also used it to create a fiercely affecting work of art.

© 1997, The New York Times Company

By Michiko Kakutani

MASON & DIXON
By Thomas Pynchon
773 pages. Henry Holt & Company. $27.50

Like "Gravity's Rainbow," it's an encyclopedic work, at once plotted and plotless, and calculated in its sheer vastness and prolixity to immerse the reader in the confusions of the world.

The Great Big Question in Thomas Pynchon's novels, from "V." (1963) through "Gravity's Rainbow" (1973) and "Vineland" (1990), has been: Is the world dominated by conspiracies or chaos? Are there patterns, secret agendas, mysterious codes -- in short, a hidden design -- to the burble and turmoil of human existence, or is it all a product of chance? Are the paranoiacs onto something, or do the nihilists have the key to it all?

In "Mason & Dixon," his long-awaited new novel -- and the most emotional and affecting work in his oeuvre to date -- Mr. Pynchon offers a variation on this favorite theme. This time, the overarching tension is between Enlightenment rationalism and absurdist despair; between the orderly processes of science and the inexplicable marvels of nature, between our modern faith in progress and the violent, primeval realities of history.

The frame on which these ideas are threaded is the real-life story of Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779), the British surveyors who mapped out the boundary line between Pennsylvania and Maryland in pre-Revolutionary America, the line that would come to be known as the Mason-Dixon line, dividing the North from the South. Needless to say, Mr. Pynchon does not adhere strictly to the historical facts, but uses those facts as a jumping-off point for a rollicking picaresque tale, filled with songs, jokes, aphorisms and bad puns, a story populated by talking clocks, petulant automatons, oracles, ghosts, golems and a giant cheese, as well as a populous cast of humans with odd, Pynchonesque names.

Alternately dazzling and vexing, tiresome and amazing, the novel tries to do many things at the same time. Like "Gravity's Rainbow," it's an encyclopedic work, at once plotted and plotless, and calculated in its sheer vastness and prolixity to immerse the reader in the confusions of the world. Like John Barth's "Sot-Weed Factor," it's a postmodern fiction that takes the form of an 18th-century novel, using Shandyesque digressions and tales within tales both to amplify the central story and to comment upon the art of storytelling itself. And like more conventional historical novels, it mixes fact and fiction, biographical detail and bawdy speculation to conjure up a vanished time and place.

Certainly it takes a lot of nerve (and ego) to write a nearly 800-page novel featuring two surveyors -- yes, surveyors -- as its heroes, but in Mr. Pynchon's capable hands, Mason and Dixon become a great buddy act, reminiscent, by turns, of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Bouvard and Pecuchet, Tom and Huck, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. Mason, who has trained as an astronomer, is the melancholy one: dour, meditative and given to bad dreams, he is haunted by the death of his wife, Rebekah, and shy about talking to his sons. Dixon is the outgoing one: fond of women and drink and song, he has a "general Desire for anything, and on lucky Days everything."

Mason and Dixon's first assignment together is a commission from the Royal Society of Astronomers to measure celestial phenomena from the vantage point of the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, an assignment used by Mr. Pynchon to give the reader a discursive chronicle of their adventures south of the equator. Though this nearly 200-page section boasts some wonderful set pieces -- including some uproarious encounters with a Learned Dog and a family of nymphomaniacs -- it is also long and labored and numbing, filled with unnecessary exposition and contrived omens of the pair's experiences in America. It could have easily been cut in half.

It is when Mason and Dixon actually set foot in the New World that the novel's central narrative picks up steam. Playful, erudite and funny, Mr. Pynchon depicts colonial America with the same sort of darkly comic energy that animated his portrait of pre-apocalyptic America in "The Crying of Lot 49" (1966), showing us the noisy, roistering crowds that fill the streets of Philadelphia and New York and the awesome vistas of wilderness that greet Mason and Dixon as they wend their way slowly westward. The America he has created in these pages is a sprawling frontier, but it's also an oddly intimate world in which everyone seems to know everyone else.

In the course of their "Ragtime"-esque peregrinations, Mason and Dixon meet George Washington (who, for some reason, is fond of talking in Yiddish); Thomas Jefferson (who supposedly lifts from Dixon the phrase "the pursuit of Happiness") and Benjamin Franklin (who comes across as a madcap skirt-chaser). The other people the pair meet are decidedly more bizarre. They are, at once, tests of Mason and Dixon's faith in Reason and emblems of America's magnetic appeal to fugitives and dreamers, the lost and disenfranchised.

There's Armand Allegre, a chef who has fled the Continent to escape an amorous automated duck; a man by the name of Zepho Beck, who metamorphoses into a beaver by the light of the full moon, and Zhang, a Chinese feng shui expert who warns that Mason and Dixon's Line will lead to centuries of bad karma.

For Mason and Dixon, the completion of the Line is a quest similar to those embraced so obsessively by such earlier Pynchon characters as Oedipa Maas and Herbert Stencil. In mapping the uncharted continent, in measuring this "Realm of Doubt," they are, in effect, creating order out of disorder, narrative (or a narrative line, as it were) out of chaos.

In this novel, however, the Line also becomes a metaphor for the bloody settling of the frontier and all its attendent violence: the massacre of Indians, the buying and selling of slaves, the domestication of a wilderness of possibilities and its transformation into a numbing landscape of "Inns and Shops, Stables, Games of Skill, Theatrickals, Pleasure-Gardens . . . a Promenade, -- nay, Mall" -- in short the sort of nightmarish modern America, menacing and malignant in its ordinariness and moral sloth, that appears in Mr. Pynchon's other novels.

Perhaps because "Mason & Dixon" is loosely based on real historical figures, Mr. Pynchon's penchant for willful allegorizing is less noticeable in this volume, and his central characters possess an emotional amplitude missing in his earlier books. In the course of the novel Dixon, and Mason especially, become fully fleshed-out people, their feelings, hopes and yearnings made as palpably real as their outrageously comic high jinks.

Certainly "Mason & Dixon" could have used some judicious editing; as it stands, its enormous bulk and intermittent longueurs will prove daunting to many readers. Still, its flaws are exuberant flaws of excess, and the reader who perseveres will be amply rewarded. In fact, as the novel rumbles along, it gathers a cumulative momentum, its density and garrulity impressing upon the reader a sense of the arduousness of Mason and Dixon's journey and the long, aching curve of their lives.

As rendered by Mr. Pynchon, "Mason & Dixon" is not simply the story of these two men's intertwined lives and their personal search for knowledge. It's also a hugely ambitious epic about America and the Age of Reason and the origins of modernity that showcases all of Mr. Pynchon's gifts as a writer: his magician's ability to fuse history and fable, science and science fiction; his Swiftean grasp of satire and his vaudevillian's sense of farce. It is a book that testifies to his remarkable powers of invention and his sheer power as a storyteller, a storyteller who this time demonstrates that he can write a novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring.

© 1997, The New York Times Company

By Michiko Kakutani

NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Translated by Edith Grossman
291 pages. Alfred A. Knopf $25

Consider the place described in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's harrowing new book. It's a country in thrall to drug dealers and terrorists, a country where four presidential candidates have been brutally killed. One of its cities is known as the most dangerous in the world: there are some 20 murders a day in its streets, and a massacre every 4 days. Within months, nearly 500 police officers have been killed, thanks to a bounty offered by a narcotics kingpin.

While that drug lord has a reputation as a ruthless killer who's blown up cars, shopping centers and a jetliner, he is regarded by some as a kind of Robin Hood, renowned for his charitable work among the poor. Politicians, businessmen, journalists and ordinary freeloaders, Mr. Garcia Marquez observes, all made the pilgrimage to the estate where the drug lord "kept a zoo with giraffes and hippos brought over from Africa, and where the entrance displayed, as if it were a national monument, the small plane used to export the first shipment of cocaine."

Though such descriptions sound as if they belong in one of Mr. Garcia Marquez's fantastical novels, they actually come from "News of a Kidnapping," his new nonfiction book. The volume chronicles the 1990 kidnapping of nine journalists by Medel lin's powerful cocaine cartel and the events that eventually led to the surrender of the cartel's leader, the notorious Pablo Escobar.

"News of a Kidnapping" not only provides a fascinating anatomy of "one episode in the biblical holocaust that has been consuming Colombia for more than 20 years," but also offers the reader new insights into the surreal history of Mr. Garcia Marquez's native country. Indeed, the reader is reminded by this book that the magical realism employed by Mr. Garcia Marquez and other Latin American novelists is in part a narrative strategy for grappling with a social reality so hallucinatory, so irrational that it defies ordinary naturalistic description.

Although readers in the United States might wish that the author had provided a succinct overview of recent Colombian history near the beginning of this book, one gradually picks up an understanding through osmosis, even as one is plunged, in medias res, into the frightening series of events that began in the summer of 1990, a mere three weeks after President Cesar Gaviria took office.

Fearful of being sent to the United States to stand trial, Escobar and his followers, the so-called "Extraditables," had begun to pressure the Colombian Government into meeting their demands. "The traffickers -- terrified by the long, worldwide reach of the United States -- realized that the safest place for them was Colombia," writes Mr. Garcia Marquez, "and they went underground, fugitives inside their own country. The great irony was that their only alternative was to place themselves under the protection of the state to save their own skins. And so they attempted -- by persuasion and by force -- to obtain that protection by engaging in indiscriminate, merciless terrorism and, at the same time, by offering to surrender to the authorities and bring home and invest their capital in Colombia, on the sole condition that they not be extradited."

In an attempt to pressure the Government and press, the Extraditables began kidnapping journalists, including Diana Turbay, publisher of the news magazine Hoy por Hoy and daughter of former President Julio Cesar Turbay Ayala; Francisco Santos, news editor of Colombia's best-selling newspaper, El Tiempo; and Maruja Pachon, a former television producer and wife of the politician Alberto Villamizar. It was Mr. Villamizar and Ms. Pachon who initially suggested that the author write a book about their ordeal.

Mr. Garcia Marquez, of course, was once a journalist himself, and in this volume he draws upon interviews with the former hostages and their families to create a compelling narrative of their abduction and captivity. As he did in "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor," a newspaper account of a miraculous survival at sea (originally written in 1955 and published in book form in 1986), he uses his novelist's instinct for emotional drama to give the reader a wonderfully immediate sense of his subjects' ordeal: their spiraling hopes and fears, their fantasies of escape, their desperation and despair.

He shows us the bonds some of the hostages developed with their guards: hapless young men, fearful for their own lives. And he also shows us the incongruities of the hostages' captivity; they were housed in rented rooms, in the middle of busy city neighborhoods, only yards from freedom and ordinary life.

At the same time, Mr. Garcia Marquez traces the strenuous efforts of family members to win the hostages' release. As he tells it, Mr. Villamizar's role was by far the most dramatic: in addition to working tirelessly for his wife's release, he also played a crucial role in negotiations leading to Escobar's surrender in 1991 in return for lenient punishment. (In 1992, he escaped from his luxurious prison; in 1993, he died in a gunfight with security forces in Medellin.)

While the language in "News of a Kidnapping" is reportorial, even flat, a far cry indeed from the luxuriant prose of the author's novels, the narrative possesses all the drama and emotional resonance of Mr. Garcia Marquez's most powerful fiction. The fact that the story he tells really happened only makes it that much more disturbing -- and sad.

As Mr. Garcia Marquez sees it, there is one culprit behind Colombia's terrible troubles: "Easy money, a narcotic more harmful than the ill-named 'heroic drugs,' was injected into the national culture," he writes. "The idea prospered: The law is the greatest obstacle to happiness; it is a waste of time learning to read and write; you can live a better, more secure life as a criminal than as a law-abiding citizen -- in short, this was the social breakdown typical of all undeclared wars."

© 1997, The New York Times Company

By Michiko Kakutani

UNDERWORLD
By Don DeLillo
827 pages. Scribner $27.50

In an earlier book, a Don DeLillo character spoke about a Joycean novel, a novel "in which nothing is left out," a novel that would capture the nervous spin and drift of recent American history and freeze forever in words a past that never stops happening.

With his astonishing new novel, Mr. DeLillo has written that book, or at least a close approximation of it. "Underworld" is an amazing performance, a novel that encompasses some five decades of history, both the hard, bright world of public events and the more subterranean world of private emotions in which individuals are connected by a secret calculus of hope and loss. It is the story of one man, one family, but it is also the story of what happened to America in the second half of the 20th century.

All of Mr. DeLillo's trademark themes are here, from real and imagined conspiracies to the media's Heisenberg effect to the threat of terrorism and random violence. Showcased as well are his razzle-dazzle talents as a writer: his gift for surreal, dead-on dialogue; his jazzy, synesthesic prose; and his cinematic ability to convey the simultaneity of experience, how the past and present, the momentous and the trivial run on an endless Mobius strip through our minds.

In the past, these talents tended to be packaged in brainy, glittering books: shrewd and absurdly comic, with some brilliantly observed vignettes of American life, but also a little chilly and sociological in effect. This time, they are infused with a new sympathy and attention to character that makes "Underworld" Mr. DeLillo's most affecting novel yet.

Whereas the brilliant talk of earlier DeLillo characters sometimes appeared to be stuffed in their mouths at random, language in this novel is used to reveal the lineaments of personality, the idioms of a time and place. Though the novel is laugh-out-loud funny at times, Mr. DeLillo's satiric impulse is matched, in these pages, by a new willingness to probe beneath the surface of his characters' lives; his hero's chronic alienation is even given a history and a source. Indeed, "Underworld" demonstrates -- much as Thomas Pynchon's novel "Mason & Dixon" did earlier this year -- that this bravura master of cerebral pyrotechnics also knows how to seize and rattle our emotions.

The novel opens with a breathtaking passage that seamlessly captures the experience of 35,000 people watching that classic Oct. 3, 1951 ballgame in which the Giants beat the Dodgers to win the pennant race. It is the same day America learned the Soviet Union had exploded an atomic bomb, the day the cold war took a deadly new turn: a bizarre confluence of events that recalls Mr. DeLillo's second novel "End Zone," which comically conflated the language of football and modern war.

Two events, then, two shots heard round the world. The first, a ballgame; the second, a tectonic development that will help alter the world's political landscape. Both events, however, will reverberate through the lives of Mr. DeLillo's characters, echoing, loudly or faintly as the case may be, over the years and decades.

In tracing the intersecting, overlapping, crisscrossing lives of dozens of people who happened to be touched by that Giants-Dodgers game and the many others connected to them by six (or fewer) degrees of separation, Mr. DeLillo introduces a teeming, Dickensian cast of baseball fanatics, conspiracy nuts, hustlers, con men, scientists, businessmen, schoolchildren, graffiti artists and nurses. There's a consequence analyst, who works with bomb-builders deep in the New Mexico desert; a sourpuss nun on the lookout for a miracle in the Bronx, and a collector of baseball memorabilia who has meticulously reproduced the Polo Grounds scoreboard in his basement.

We meet Lenny Bruce, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and J. Edgar Hoover, and we meet Cotter Martin, a scrawny kid who goes home with the game-winning ball. Also among the baseball fans is Nick Shay, the novel's youthful hero, who shares a Bronx childhood and Roman Catholic upbringing with his creator.

For Nick, whose father has mysteriously disappeared -- absconded or killed for his gambling debts, nobody really knows -- the game will come to signify the incalculable losses of life, the vagaries of chance and fate. One day he will buy what is said to be the game-winning ball, a talisman whose long, arching flight signifies both the bizarre trajectory of recent history and the strange direction Nick's own life has taken, from the streets of the Bronx to a stint in reform school (for murder, no less) to a quiescent middle age in the Southwest.

Cutting back and forth in time and between a multitude of plot lines, Mr. DeLillo creates a wonderfully rich, elliptical narrative, filled with recapitulations, refrains and leitmotifs, a narrative that possesses all the improvisatory rhythm and magic of jazz. While the story of Nick Shay supplies the book with a conventional sort of suspense -- who did he kill and why? will he tell his wife about his past? will his marriage founder on the rocks of his detachment? -- the many subsidiary subplots, clustering around Nick's story, allow Mr. DeLillo to examine a broad spectrum of lives that provide us with a Kodachrome-sharp picture of 50 years of American life.

The prim yet shadowed existence of suburbanites during the 50's and 60's; the dangerous, ad hoc life of squatters in the Bronx of the 80's; the ordered, orderly existence of would-be yuppies; the improvised bohemian life of would-be artists: all are nimbly conjured up for us by Mr. DeLillo, who uses his ferocious eye for detail to give these pieces of his giant jigsaw puzzle a tactile, sensuous luster.

Not only does he give us a vivid sense of how things have changed -- and endured -- in Nick's old neighborhood in the Bronx, but he also conveys a visceral sense of the surreal weirdness that has infected contemporary life. Indeed, the America presented in this volume is a distillation of the America we glimpsed in earlier DeLillo books like "White Noise" and "Mao II."

It's a place where paranoia has replaced religion as an organizing principle, a place where the clammy "hand of coincidence" reaches into everybody's life and "all terror is local," captured on videotape and endlessly rerun on television. A sniper roams the highways of Texas, looking for victims; foreign tourists drift through the streets of the South Bronx, taking snapshots of the havoc and ruin, and teen-age rock musicians dress up like terrorists with fake bomb packs strapped to their chests.

"It looked as if something had happened in the night," writes Mr. DeLillo, "to change the rules of what is thinkable." The controlling metaphor of "Underworld" has to do with waste, with chemical and nuclear toxins, as well as the more mundane trash our ravenous, bulimic society recycles. One character is "a garbage guerrilla who stole and analyzed the household trash" of celebrities; another is an entrepreneur specializing in the buying and disposal of hazardous waste. Even Nick Shay ends up with a well-paying job in waste analysis.

Other characters take the trash they see around them and try to turn it into something new. Nick's old lover, Klara, salvages discarded military planes, repaints them in fanciful colors and arranges them in artful compositions in the desert. Another artist has built a huge sculpture known as the Watts Tower out of "steel rods and broken crockery and pebbles and seashells and soda bottles and wire mesh"; he has built a "jazz cathedral" out of junk.

The same might well be said of Mr. DeLillo, who in this remarkable novel has taken the effluvia of modern life, all the detritus of our daily and political lives, and turned it into a dazzling, phosphorescent work of art.

© 1997, The New York Times Company

By Michiko Kakutani

TOWARD THE END OF TIME
By John Updike
334 pages. Alfred A. Knopf $25

"Toward the End of Time," the latest novel by John Updike, prompts the same question raised by Joyce Carol Oates's last novel: how can such a gifted writer produce such a lousy book?

How could this veteran novelist, who just last year published the magisterial and masterly In the Beauty of the Lilies, follow that dazzling performance with this callous and perfunctory book? Is it that Mr. Updike poured everything he really cared about into that last volume, and was left temporarily drained? Is it the self-imposed pressure of publishing at least one new book a year? Or is it simply that many prolific authors, regardless of their talent, produce their share of lemons?

Certainly, "Toward the End of Time" belongs to Mr. Updike's lemon category, along with "The Witches of Eastwick" (1984), "S" (1988) and "Brazil" (1994), other books that also try unsuccessfully to push the envelope of the author's talent and fail to exploit his strengths as a naturalistic writer. In each of these novels, Mr. Updike's usual sympathy for -- and insight into -- his characters gives way to cartoonish caricature, while his fascination with the intricacies of marriage, adultery and male-female relations devolves into the clumsy string-pulling of a chauvinistic puppeteer.

In the case of "Toward the End of Time," Mr. Updike has produced a particularly sour, ugly and haphazardly constructed novel, which takesthe form of a journal kept in the year 2020 by a 66-year-old retired investment counselor named Ben Turnbull who lives in a splendid mansion in Massachusetts. Though Ben shares basic Updikean traits with a host of earlier characters -- importunate sexual urges combined with vague spiritual yearnings, an inclination toward melancholy introspection,and a love of golf -- he actually turns out to have less in common with the likes of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom or Richard Maple than he does with Mickey Sabbath, the repellent hero of Philip Roth's 1995 novel, "Sabbath's Theater."

Like Sabbath, Ben is a narcissistic and dirty-minded old man --self-absorbed, bitter and malicious. He is cut off from the outside world, contemptuous of other people's feelings and obsessed with excrement, sex and death. He is not only a highly unpleasant character, but also one who is implausible and impossible to understand. His rage and disgust are grounded in no discernable cause; his contempt for women, in no emotional history.

In the course of this book, Ben urges (or imagines urging) a gang of teen-agers to burn down a neighbor's house blocking his view of the sea. He urges them to kill a neighbor's pets. He fantasizes about killing his wife, Gloria. He plays sexual games with a 13-year-old girl. And he imagines having sex with a deer that lives in the woods behind his house. Ben's descriptions of the women in his life are uniformly sexist and condescending. He portrays his wife as "a cheerful, soignee vulture" who loses all interest in him once prostate cancer leaves him impotent. He depicts his mistress, Deirdre (who is supposed to be some sort of reincarnation of the deer he lusts after), as a foul-smelling whore who spouts feminist claptrap. He describes a woman in his former office as "a choice cut of meat." And he daydreams about watching his daughter-in-law sit on a toilet.

If this weren't bad enough, the reader is also subjected to Ben's self-important and self-serving philosophizing about relationships between the sexes. He is constantly saying things like, "Females carry the burden of the world, I think, but men the magic -- the universal magic, the glittering super-dense sperm that spurted out of nothing to make the Big Bang." Or, "Through the bodies of women men conduct what tortured dealings they can with the universe, producing serial murder and morganatic marriages and a Morgan Library's worth of love letters, novels and death threats."

When Ben isn't blathering on about women, he's talking, equally distastefully, about his own bodily functions: his increasingly frequent need to urinate, and his aging body's odors. Interspersed with these disquisitions are strange asides narrated from the point of view of an Egyptian grave robber ("A pox on Horus! May Anubis dine on his own excrement in the life everlasting"), a ninth-century monk and a Nazi guard. These people presumably represent other incarnations of Ben, who seems to believe in the notion of parallel universes and multiple lives.

As depicted by Mr. Updike, however, these other people's stories shed little light on Ben's current existence, except to point up how narrow and indulgent a life he leads. In fact these perfunctorily executed passages feel as though they were shoehorned into the narrative in a desperate attempt to lend the story a significance it lacks.

To make matters worse, Mr. Updike's decision to set Ben's story in a post-World War III future -- America has supposedly been devastated by a nuclear war with China -- is never fleshed out. This setup robs Mr. Updike of the opportunity to use his fierce, pictorial gift for observation, and as a result, the social fabric of the novel feels unusually flimsy. Instead of situating Ben in a palpable world, Mr. Updike has his narcissistic hero babble on ridiculously about minutiae like his underwear. The result sounds suspiciously like a Nicholson Baker parody of Updike: "Sitting on the toilet yesterday, I suddenly saw as if for the first time the miraculous knit of the Jockey underpants stretched across my knees. Tiny needles, functioning in cunning clusters at inhuman speeds, had contrived to entangle tiny white threads with perfect regularity to form this comfortably pliable, lightweight and slightly elastic fabric."

At the same time, Mr. Updike never really tries to imagine what a futuristic America might be like. With the exception of one funny conceit (that Federal Express has replaced the defunct Federal Government as a supplier of social services and law enforcement), Mr. Updike's future looks very much like the present: there are problems with random violence, inner-city decay and teen-age crime; people spend a lot of time at malls and wear blue jeans and "barbarically ornate running shoes."

As he did in his "Rabbit" books, Mr. Updike seems to want to draw an analogy between the world (this time, a "dwindled, senile world") and his hero's state of mind. Ben feels beleaguered, anxious and adrift; ergo, the world, too, is beleaguered, anxious and adrift.

Although Updike's characters have always been haunted by existential intimations of mortality, those feelings seem heightened in Ben's case. They stem not from his cancer, which is diagnosed only toward the end of the book, but from his weariness with life and marriage and the human condition. The seasonal shifts in sunlight, the rhythms of growth and decay in his garden, the theory of a collapsing universe, all become, in Ben's mind, symptoms of his own imminent demise.

Similar feelings, of course, surfaced in Mr. Updike's last "Rabbit" novel and his last collection of stories, but those books depicted such emotional states with wonderful sympathy and nuance. In "Toward the End of Time," those emotions simply feel like the complaints of a selfish, spoiled man.

© 1997, The New York Times Company