'The Nephew': Bathetic Optimism

I wish I could report enthusiastically about James Purdy's latest work, The Nephew, But unfortunately this second novel lacks those outstanding qualities of insight and fantasy that made Malcolm, his first novel, so extraordinary.

The Nephew seems to have been conceived--quite intentionally--in realistic, conventional terms, perhaps in an effort to mirror its platitudinous theme: that people can eventually come to understand one another. Here the uncommunicative world Purdy created in Malcolm, half-seen, half-dreamt, is no longer considered the true metaphor of the human condition.

Malcolm told, in often hilarious, often shocking sequences, about the aloneness of a beautiful boy in a world that needed him. As soon as Malcolm becomes truly involved in this world, he is destroyed by it; he is victimized by the greed of those who love him. Its magnificent beginning which introduces us to Malcolm's plight is a fine example of Purdy's peculiarly over-generalized prose style.

In front of one of the most palatial hotels in the world, a very young man was accustomed to sit on a bench which, when the light fell in a certain way, shone like gold.

"seemed to belong nowhere and to Soon after we are told that Malcolm nobody." During his wild and weird adventures with a variety of insecure and troubling people, his loneliness persists. Purdy's closing image of Malcolm's grave, neglected and uncared for, gives a final ironic commentary on Malcolm's inability to find a trustworthy friend.

Malcolm is a depressing work, not merely because we come to like its unhappy hero, but because, despite the saniness of his adventures, even the most fantastic passages convince us that we have experienced the truth of their basic theme: man is unable to help another avoid the misery of loneliness.

The Nephew sets out to disown both the technique and theme of Malcolm. The first paragraph shows us that a different, more conservative Purdy is writing:

All the flags were out in front of the houses and stores in Rainbow Center on Memorial Day, as Boyd Mason drove his Bulck back from a real-estate trip to Kentucky, and parked on the east corner of Peninsula Drive and Crest Ridge Road

and so on and on. Its plethora of detail suggests an almost comic contrast with the style of Malcolm.

Cliff, the "nephew" in question, is an ordinary boy who lived with his admiring aunt and uncle and who was killed in the Korean War. His aunt Alma decides to write a memorial for him and, in collecting material from her neighbors, learns that she had known nothing of the boy's desire to leave the provincial town, and of his hatred of the charity she and her brother had given him.

Alma accepted the news of Cliff's hatred with a speech filled with soap opera bathos:

"You told me the truth, and I believe it, but if you think I don't love Cliff all the more for hearing it, you're mistaken. Because I see how much more he needed the little love anyone could give. He was unhappier than we knew."

Yet, the oddest thing about this novel is that his speech is moving in context, is, in fact, one of the best tear-jerkers I've come across in recent fiction.

A sentimental appeal is about the only one the work offers. It has its delightful emotive effect and then, when the weeping subsides, one comes to grips with the work itself. I found myself asking, among many questions, why Alma can so courageously accept the news of her nephew's hatred and why the ending was so painstakingly and unconvincingly happy.

I thought that perhaps the answer was simply that Purdy had shamelessly turned to commercialism. A happy ending novel, it is true, might seem more likely to appeal to a mass audience than a grisly book like Malcolm. But The Nephew has not had much critical or popular success since its release last winter. It is too deliberately paced and too introspective to qualify as a mere pot boiler. Purdy has obviously not sold himself out.

I imagine that Purdy has rejected the bizarre fancies of Malcolm because he feels that its pictures of the world is seriously distorted. It depicts, after all, a world that admits no happiness, no understanding, no love; it may be a memorable universe, but it is also an over-simplified one. The Nephew seems to be a step toward Purdy's creation of a more balanced and whole world-picture. I wonder, though, if any recent writer has either strived for or attained such a Weltanschauung. And, if such there be, I wonder if it has really helped him as a writer.

The Nephew is in this sense a necessary step towards a questionable goal. In fact, it may well contain the most personal writing Purdy has ever done. Yet, it lacks the richness of character and incident that made Malcolm so spectularly good and does not convince us of its basic truthfulness. Though Purdy may later combine its measured realism and its moving, if sentimental, warmth, with the bizarre texture of Malcolm, I question if it will actually help him on to more fertile fictional subjects than those of Malcolm.

Purdy has too great a talent for story-telling and fictional observation to waste it further on books as uninteresting as The Nephew. There are many novelists who can make its affirmative themes convincing. Purdy has deliberately chosen to do what he has not tried before and failed. Though it may be wrong to blame an artist of Purdy's caliber for trying something different, I feel I am unable to do otherwise. If he is to continue as one of America's most exciting younger writers, Purdy must realize that his first novel was his best. Its vision of the world--though one-sided--is the one he depicts masterfully