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As for The Steagle (Random House) by Irvin Faust, 42, a Long Island child-guidance counselor, let the reader beware: this pop novel pops so violently that it cannot safely be perused without welding goggles. It tells the story of a man in whom two personalities merge—as pro football's Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles once merged into "The Steagles." The man is Harold Aaron ("Heshy") Weissburg, a nice Jewish intellectual who lives with his nice wife and their two nice children until—CHOONG! The Cuban missile crisis blows up his complacency and releases his alter ego: an unquiet Quixote who jumps on the nearest jet and goes whooshing across the U.S. in search of his true identity. Like Bloom in darkling Dublin, like Mitty in the mazes of Waterbury, Conn., he dissolves into fantasies elaborated to suggest simultaneously a madness in himself and in America. Headlines, brand names, movie stars, sports heroes, billboards, road signs, dirty jokes—they whirl in his head like garbage in a Disposall. And what's there when Faust flips the chopper off? An almighty typographical mux that is often confusing but amusing.
Two of the cleverest pop novels suggest subdivisions of the genre. The Piano Sport (Atheneum) by Don Asher, 40, might be called a bop novel. Written by a man who plays funky piano at the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, the book tells a sprightly story about a cat who plays piano somewhere else in town. Call the Keeper (Viking) by Nat Hentoff, 41, a man-about-Manhattan who writes voluminously about jazz, race and Greenwich Village, is an ingenious pop thriller about jazz, race and Greenwich Village. The main menace is a Negro intellectual who hangs out with jazzbos and cuts up his victim on Bleecker Street.
Happily for literature, not all the new U.S. novelists are attempting to renovate the novel. Many make admirable use of the established forms. Appearance of a Man (Random House) by George Backer, 63, an ex-publisher of the New York Post who inherited a real estate fortune and has served as a political adviser to Averell Harriman, elucidates the psychology of power in an intelligent tale about a character admittedly modeled on the late James Forrestal. All the Little Heroes (Bobbs-Merrill) by Herbert Wilner, 40, describes with tender humor and felicity how in the last ten days of his life a dying man learns how to live. This Blessed Shore (Shorecrest) by Thomas B. Morgan, 39, recounts with rage and considerable skill how another dying man (the author's father) suffered terminal agonies that in Morgan's opinion required the exercise of euthanasia.
The season's three most flagrantly gifted first novels are conventional in plot and structure, but exuberantly original in feeling and character.