(3 of 4)
Joanna Ostrow is one of those writers who seem to have been born with every insight, every comma in place. Her book lies far beyond such usual first-novel adjectives as "promising." A classically perfect little story, it polarizes an encounter between the frantic present and an almost still-life past.
Simon, son of a Belfast prostitute and a black, is the child of modern chaos personified. After a number of false starts, he enters college in Edinburgh where he learns that his foster father is in the hospital and his foster mother has been left alone on their Highlands farm, the croft, where he was brought up. Packing up his wife and two small children, Simon returns to his heritage-by-adoption.
It is a cold, bleak, yet harshly absorbing little universe, with absolutely no future. The croft is an anachronism, like the Gaelic that Simon's foster parents still speak occasionally—"a whole language and no world left to make sense of it." Overhead R.A.F. jets streak the sky. On the pantry shelf, instant oatmeal has scandalously appeared. And the once stout cottage, Simon discovers, is being eaten by woodworms. Eden is crumbling into something like a badly maintained folklore museum.
But was it ever Eden, really? Miss Ostrow explores the fine distinction between a search for roots and a return to the womb. Her range of style matches her breadth of feeling. She can move from a tweeds-and-walking-shoes prose while writing about a hare-and-hound hunt to a kind of mod Jane Austen.
Miss Ostrow, 32, is a native New Yorker who lived in Scotland in the early 1960s and now has settled, with her husband and two small daughters, on a farm in Canada. Obviously she is miles beyond the romantic simplicities of Celtic revivalism. She is in the presence of death, and she knows it. Her achievement is to show that when tradition dies, it can affect the swinging young even more than the hidebound old.
THE CONVERSION by Victor Perera. 307 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.
No country is wholly safe from an invasion by that familiar character of American-Jewish fiction, the academic rabbi manque who is Talmudically attempting to work out an identity crisis. In The Conversion, Professor Victor Perera, a lecturer at Vassar, sends a modern Jew, whose Sephardic ancestors were expelled by the Inquisition in 1492, back to Spain for the treatment. Protagonist Stanley Bendana is ostensibly on a graduate grant to write his M.A. thesis (its title: Byzantine Conventions in Cervantes and Their Influence on 17th Century English Pastoral Poetry). Actually, Bendana is off on a jaunty windmill whirl of role playing. With Sancho Pan-za-like fidelity, he performs as the hypocrite Jew to a cracked canon's private inquisition, acts as a male Galatea to the less-than-female girl of his seminar dreams, tries out as incestuous brother to a brothel sister, and winds up as surrogate son to an Auschwitz graduate. That last role bestows upon him a final benediction, the sovereign sense of self.