Questing the "Cosmic"

Two years at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and his present interment in the Army have not dulled the wit of George Jerome Goodman '52. He has fashioned a novel about a Harvard undergraduate whose antics defy comparison. Maybe Charlie Garnier's outlook is normal, but his projects certainly are not. The Bubble Makers is as lively a story as polished writing and a subtle sense of irony can make it. Goodman's first book is riotous reading.

Charlie is the character with the largest bubble. Most of his time at College he devotes to organizing a jeep safari to Bhutan, a "terrific country" somewhere on top of Tibet. As he himself explains, "I just wanna do one cosmic thing before I turn completely middle-aged and start making the same noise as all the other bees." For a while Charlie's Smith College girl gives him able support. But then she decides she would prefer to get married. "It might be dull," she says, "but it's definitely the coming thing."

Simon Garnier, Charlie's dignified but bibulous old grandfather, is the only really complex character of the book. Unlike the others he is something more than just an amusing quantity, and Goodman has drawn him deftly. Once a Missouri Supreme Court Justice he retired from the bench with a characteristic comment: "the people is a great beast." When Charlie comes to visit his grandfather, Old Garnier is still dispensing snorting judgments upon our modern culture from his 18th-century mansion overlooking the Mississippi. One of the cleverest portions of the book describes his approaching senility. But it never approaches far enough for him to dispense with the necessary funds for Charlie's Bhutan scheme.

The plot of the novel, then, merely concerns some bubbles which pop. Nor has the story itself any "cosmic" significance, unless as a running commentary upon everyday America. And even these comments figure in jokes along the way rather than in any destined conclusion to the book. The real heart of The Bubble Makers is not its subject matter but its style.

Goodman has written breezily, with a happy choice of similes and popular idoms. Sometimes he relishes phrases which are deliberately pompous, almost Dickensian. When several of his college friends once enjoyed too much of his grandfather's brandy, Charlie lay in bed that night and smiled at the "regurgitory choruses" issuing from the bathroom.

The innumerable parodies are triumphs, too, all of them sketched with an ironic hand. Driving along the highway, Charlie contemplates some billboards. "A pretty girl pauses at the peak of her swan dive. . . After you pass, presumably she finishes, . . . slipping soundlessly in the frosty glass of beer beneath her." This is the pace, never strained, which Goodman maintains throughout the book.

Yet The Bubble Makers is much more than just a string of jokes. Resigned to the impossibility of reaching Bhutan, Charlie valiantly battles a Mississippi flood. Although this episode is almost a separate story in itself, Goodman's skill in developing the ludicrous drama of the situation compensates for any looseness in the plot. One realizes that the role of "flood-control expert" is for Charlie a substitute Bhutan. After working himself to the point of collapse on a levee, and nearly drowning in the process, he cheerfully announces: "It was the best time I've ever had." An element of charm here is undeniable. The same is true of The Bubble Makers as a whole.