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A product time-and-motion study on the first novel from inception to marketing would drive any management consultant mad. The book spends, say, three years festering in the author's brain and typewriter. Often two years are required for going the rounds of agents and publishers (who hold a manuscript at least three months before rejecting it). Once the book is accepted, another year may be needed for ed iting, printing and distribution. When the product finally surfaces, it may hold a place in the crucial "shelf-time" period for only two or three days. Large bookstores are so heavily stocked that some well-reviewed first novels never get to the bookshelves at all.
Publishers, who periodically convene to contemplate the plight of the first novel with a melancholy akin to that so often displayed in the theater world over the perennial decline of Broadway, have considered various cures. Among them: better bookstores; special sales packages of three or four first novels together: a first-novel book club; mailorder contact with some constituency of youthful readers who are thought to care enough about serious, unheralded fiction to buy it.
Meanwhile, first novelists go on working, a continuing proof of the no doubt mad, but nevertheless encouraging notion that money isn't everything. Below is a look at some recent first novels. Their authors may or may not make a bestseller list, but they should be read.
PRINCIPATO by Tom McHale. 311 pages. Viking. $6.95.
Not since Tennessee Williams' no-necked Flynns from Memphis has there been such a terrible family of Irish-Americans as the Corrigans of Philadelphia—"a wealthy tribe of shanty Irish, they'd take the sweat from the poor dead Jesus." Principato, the beleaguered hero of this hilarious novel, finds out about the Corrigans the hard way by marrying Cynthia, the barge-footed only daughter of the clan. Battening off a string of funeral homes and ghetto bars, his in-laws scheme constantly within a parochial Jansenist world of indulgences and spiritual bouquets. For them, a family's social status is measured by the number of priests and nuns it has produced.
The offspring of Principato's union with Cynthia have "sallow skins and strange russet-colored hair" and answer to the jig-prompting names of Terrance, Sean. Noreen. Aloysius and Kathleen. To their Italian fathers dismay, they avoid the sun like moles, playing sourly in the shade or roaming dark hallways. Principato blunders through eleven years among this dreadful crew until his father, dying of cancer, announces that he will not mend his 35-year rift with Holy Mother Church and, far more shocking, intends to be cremated. The scandalized Corrigans mount a frenzied campaign to scoop old Principato into a sanctified casket—but only manage to ruin his son's life.
Author McHale, 28, can tell off urban Catholics, from the bishops down to the Holy Name members, with the familiarity of a devout housewife telling off her rosary beads. A recent graduate (Temple, class of '63) who teaches writing at Monmouth College, N.J.. he already has a formidable mastery of technique, as well as a deeper insight into the clash between time and eternity.
... IN THE HIGHLANDS SINCE TIME IMMEMORIAL by Joanna Osfrovv. 306 pages. Knopf. $5.95.