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"How to live and grow old inside a head I'm contemptuous of, in a culture I despise." The voice belongs to Joe Allston, a retired talent agent who serves as protagonist of Wallace Stegner's latest novel. But the problem is one that seems to have much preoccupied Stegner himself. Author of such celebrated books as Angle of Repose and Big Rock Candy Mountain, and for years a teacher at Stanford University, Stegner is only 67 and still active. But for some time his narrators have been older people (70 and upward). They mount the crow's-nest of age to look back (and down) on current civilization. The resulting au thor's voice is full of a distinctive sardonic ruefulness that produces a style of its own.
Joe Allston, for example, describes himself as "a wisecracking fellow traveler in the lives of other people, and a tourist in his own." He is aching from rheumatoid arthritis but resents all treatment. "It irritates me to have people blowing out my gas line and testing my spark plugs and feeling all over me for loose wires." His wife Ruth worries about him, and keeps urging him to write "something, anything." So he begins "the way a kid lost in the mountains might holler at a cliff just to hear a voice."
What Allston writes is a recollection of a trip to Denmark made 20 years earlier. It is, as Stegner admits, a gothic tale complete with a brief interlude with Baroness Karen Blixen herself and a teasingly slow revelation of the sins of the Danish aristocracy. Allston, looking for his ancestral past, concludes that many things are rotten in the state of Denmark, and always have been, as they are in any place the human race inhabits.
Bittersweet Process. For a man like Joe Allston, who lives off other men's talents and is a failed talent himself, the book becomes a study on how to survive in a world where "most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus." The way of survival most celebrated here is the bittersweet process of an aging marriage. Allston muses in his closing coda: "The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. But Ruth is right. It is something—it can be everything—to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and righting go on below." Wallace Stegner's message seems to be that, as in the ark, mankind and other animals go more gently into that good night if they go two by two.
A FINE ROMANCE
by CYNTHIA PROPPER SETON 192 pages. Norton. $7.95.
Readers who have an eye for danger signals will approach with extreme caution any novel that borrows its title from Cole Porter and its prose style from Henry James. But what wariness can possibly suffice if, in fact, the plot proves to deal with what surely must be the last of the Last Puritans from Boston, discovering during a bus trip with his family in decadent old Europe that he is a creature of passion as well as a man of reason? On top of Mount Etna and at the age of 53, yet!