(5 of 6)
Charles is a list maker, the kind of kid who cannot be happy unless he writes the reasons why. But this is 1936, a year to be miserable. So he notes five motives for cutting out. The last is the saddest: "Because I'll 'never grow up as long as I'm here where everybody thinks I'm just a kid " Everyone is right. He is just a kid, a fatherless adolescent who already bears scars of the Depression and its aftermath. The boy's New England home town is as stifling as the air in his room, and his mother is too full of mourning to understand the boy's urges. Frustration clings to his plans like moss to a sapling.
With Charles, as with his antecedents Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield, flight is a notion, not a goal; all paths lead inescapably to man's estate. First Novelist Barnard, a travel writer, gives this familiar story a freshness by locating it in a simpler era. In 1936 summer is defined as the time between haircuts; National Geographic and Lowell Thomas provide the few glimpses of the outside world; Hudson sedans and the St. Louis Browns are assumed to be permanent components of the American scene; history is close enough to scorch the earth, yet the insular town can only hear its own heartbeat. Today, when adolescence is armed with purchasing power and microscopically examined for tendencies, Wonderful Summer has the aura— and the value—of an antique. For as riders of those Hudsons knew, the view from a good rearview mirror can be as revealing as the one from a windshield.
THE SUICIDE'S WIFE by David Madden Bobbs-Merrill; 185 pages; $8.95
Four years ago, David Madden published Bijou, a luxurious novel of adolescent sexual torment that never received the critical attention it deserved. That novel was laden with incident and feeling, thick with nostalgia for a vanished small-town South; The Suicide's Wife is laconic and thin. A failed academic poet commits suicide (Madden offers examples of his work, which provide a clue), and his bland, colorless wife discovers that her existence is unfathomable in his absence. Haunted by her husband's apparently motiveless death, unnerved by her three children's importunate curiosity about their father, she struggles to rekindle his image in her mind— and to create a personality for herself.
The Suicide's Wife is a study in passivity; Madden has managed to portray from within the sensation of nothingness that manifests itself in a concentration upon objects, an obsession with the texture of things. His novel is an American version of Sartre's Nausea: a definitive portrait of depression. As such, The Suicide's Wife is masterly; but the author's note promises that his work in progress, Pleasure-Dome, will be a sequel to Bijou -reassuring news to readers familiar with that richly evocative book.
WRINKLES by Charles Simmons Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 182 pages; $8.95
In the era of the facelift, Charles Simmons' third novel, Wrinkles, is a reminder that age withers and custom stales, that love, children and work are procrastinations before getting down to the serious business of dying.