Blair Fuller: 'A Far Place'

The would-be adventurers in the Care Capriccio should get a big bang out of "A Far Place." It is by an ex-MacLeish student, who spent two years in Accra, Dakar, and Abidjan working for Texaco, and has also played factory hand, circus roustabout, department store salesman, U.P. Staff correspondent, and Associate Editor of the Paris Review. He also spent a year writing "A Far Place," in Paris, before becoming a Barnard English teacher.

His diamond-smuggling hero is also employed by an oil company in Africa, and is another rootless, if educated, man. His disorientation fits neatly into the stifling heat of West Africa, where life consists of Copulating, making money to take vacations, drinking, and playing tennis. Hero Reed Hodgins meets misfortune because he wants to make more money than Africa affords through legitimate channels.

This makes a very nice adventure story, which can easily be read in a couple of hours before going to bed. In this season of headcolds such reading is perhaps a necessary concession to the mental fogginess engendered in the academic world. Certainly "A Far Place" can make no other claims.

The Skillful Nihilist

The author, like the hero, has no point of view about anything. Life seems to be a more or less incomprehensible flux of discontinuous events which lead to the grave. This none too original point of view is developed very skillfully, as in the use of the half-pedestrian, half-romantic oppression of the natives to keep the hero in proper perspective.

But despite the skill, it is hard to see why anybody should care an iota what happens to Fuller's hero. Life may mean nothing, positive values may be ephemeral dreams, and happiness may be best symbolized by the orgasm, but these are attitudes which at this late date make unstimulating reading. Yet it is the very monotony, the lack of anything difficult or original, which couples with the skillful whodunit to make "A Far Place" an eminently successful diversion. After all, who wants to be stimulated after eight hours in the stacks?