Younger writers who've pulled off that rare feat, a wonderful first book, work on under a hefty burden of expectations. Frank Conroy was thirty in 1967 when he published Stop-Time, his memoirs of a childhood marked by the absence of a dis- turbed and alcoholic father. A collection of sharp images retrieved "from the very edge of memory," Stop-Time anatomized experience rather than judged it, setting forth episodes of boyhood--the thrill of scavenging an abandoned building with a best friend, the brutal beating of a help- less fat boy at boarding school from a detached, almost amoral perspective that held out to readers the persistent illusion of breaking through adult sentimentality to see life as it "really" was.
Praised lavishly for its intelligent candor by such authorities as Norman Mailer and William Styron, Stop-Time went on to become that writer's dream, a true word-of-mouth book, remaining contin- uously in print decade after decade, win- ning new generations of readers and setting a standard for childhood narratives against which other talented practitioners—from Annie Dillard to Theodore Weesner to Alice McDermott to E.L. Doctorow—could be measured. Meanwhile, however, Conroy himself (who currently is director of the famed Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa) managed but a single slim volume of stories in a quarter-century (Midair, 1984), invoking anxieties—shared, according to interviews, by the author himself—of that nightmare of literary nightmares, a one-book career.
Now, at last, along comes Body & Soul, a sprawling bildungsroman taking up the youthful adventures of a musical prodigy named Claude Rawlings. Weighing in at 450 pages, the book clearly means to put all doubts to rest: "a big novel..." Conroy has called it, "a book [not] about me but about the world."
Such comments notwithstanding, it's bard not to read Body & Soul as an updated Stop-Time. Both books have as heroes a musically precocious boy growing up fatherless in postwar New York, and both explore, to a greater or lesser degree, the same terrain: isolation, imagination, and the redemptive power of art. Alas, however—I might as well say it fight off—lovers of Stop-Time are in for a big disappointment. Slack where Stop-Time was taut, stale where Stop-Time was startlingly fresh, Body & Soul rarely approaches the brilliance of its shimmering progenitor.
The novel begins promisingly enough. Following Claude Rawlings around from the dingy apartment he shares with his taxi-driver mother to the music store where his mentor, Weisfeld, teaches him piano, Conroy takes us on a guided tour through a long-lost New York. Food automats dispense franks and beans for a quarter, neighborhood saloons on V-E Day offer free beer for anyone in uniform, and in the background Rosemary Clooney sings "Come On-a My House." In the shadow of the Third Avenue el, Claude shines shoes, collects bottles, and indulges in a little petty larceny. He' s like Doctorow' s enterprising New York City boys, growing up clever and tough; but Conroy's version of the street urchin is softened by a quiet, baffled wonder:
In the general torpor specific noises stood out in high relief—the wheezing of a bus, the clacking, rattling rush of the el, angry voices from inside a tenement, the crash of a storefront gate—thick sounds rising with an eerie clarity against the unnatural silence. On an empty street he might watch his own feet, as if to reassure himself that he was not dreaming. He might wipe the sweat from his face with the back of his hand and then look at the back of his hand. He was often dizzy.
This is the quiet intensity that made Stop Time so terrific, and it's what Conroy does best: carefully detailing the texture of consciousness, with its dizzying intimations of self and the formidable, some times terrifying otherness of the world. Conroy's boy protagonists, while precocious, are nevertheless children; ideas come to them not abstractly, but with taste, a shape, a sound. Their world is in corrigibly sensual, and in Body & Soul as in his earlier memoirs, the author renders this sensuality superbly.
As soon as Body & Soul busies itsel with the action of Claude's budding career, however, things start to go bad. Conroy knows a lot about music, and uses it in fashioning a successful career out of the dubious and scattered materials of Claude's circumstances. The problem lies in the characters with whom he surrounds his wunderkind. Dividing the boy's world neatly between mentors and antagonists, Conroy paints these figures with very broad strokes. There's the eccentric but kindly artist; the cold and shallow Upper East Side socialite, impervious to art; the shabby, soulful Eastern European Jew, tormented by Holocaust nightmares; the jovial black janitor with a heart of gold and a bottomless fund of folk wisdom ("You got to decide if the mad runs you, or you run the mad"). These are not living characters but types; worse, they're secondhand types, inherited from other New York writers, like Tom Wolfe or Bernard Matamud, who've done them far more compellingly.
Similarly, Conroy seems to have lost his ear for original language. The novel offers a full menu of bad writing, from bland straightforwardness ("A quiet idealism glowed on both of these small, protected campus worlds—islands of optimism within the larger security of calm, prosperous postwar America") to Mushy Love Writing ("As her soul welcomed him, his own was cleansed. As they ascended together into the blue beyond blue, all else was trivial"). One searches Body & Soul in vain for the kind of pinpoint-accurate insight into what makes people tick that made Stop-Time sing. But the new novel's characters remain stubbornly fuzzy and shallow. They are functional; less like real people than props furnishing the stage of Claude Rawlings's moral education.
The problem goes right to the heart of the differences between the two books. Stop-Time was both a reflection upon, and a recreation of, the extreme limitedness of a child's perspective. Its protagonist's deeply adolescent assumption was that life will never change, that it goes nowhere. "An adult [Conroy wrote] recognizes petty problems for what they are and transcends them through his higher preoccupations, his goals—he moves on, as it were. A child has no choice but to accept the immediate experiences of his life at face value. He isn't moving on, he simply is."
The lack of a redemptive telos, the refusal to discern or impose a "story" upon often painful and difficult events, gave Stop-Time its pessimistic cast—the narrative structure is framed by an account of the grown-up Conroy driving wildly through the night, drunk, heading for a crash—but also its vivid and penetrating honesty. The various people who pass through young Frank's life have no func- tion, no part in a larger story, because from Frank's point of view there is no larger story. People aren't there to teach Frank anything he wants to learn; they're simply there to be seen in all their mysterious and sometimes tedious particularity. As its title implies, Stop-Time relies for its success upon stuckness. The mode of the book is the trenchant skepticism of an exceedingly intelligent young person convinced he isn't going anywhere.
Body & Soul, on the other hand, exudes progress and higher preoccupations. Life, it insists, is indeed a story, a series of peaks and valleys along a gradually rising curve toward enlightenment. Surprisingly, Conroy seems to have grown up into an optimist; but it's an optimism that strains and creaks in its dogged insistence on making everything fit together, on delivering every last lesson and missing piece. Nowhere does it creak more loudly than in the novel's climactic scene, when the author maneuvers his hero, by now an internationally known concert pianist in his midtwenties, into an unwitting and coincidental reunion with his long-lost father—who turns out (surprise!) to be ajazz pianist in a London nightclub. The two musicians play together four-handed, setting the house on fire with their shared passion for jazz, Claude unaware of the true identity of the man next to him, yet inexplicably drawn to him .... And so on. The scene has the sweetness of Hollywood product: "perfect" to the last detail.
Behind such sentimental manipulations lies a deep romanticism about creative ge- nius and the nobility of art. Body & Soul is suffused by a longing for the purity of artistic devotion. It deals Claude (and the reader) chastening life lessons, ultimate- ly offering salvation in a deep commitment to "the work." The tone of the novel is warm but powerfully earnest. "You're not a kid anymore," Weisfeld counsels Claude when the boy confesses bewil- derment at the twelve-tone system of modern music. "You're on your way to becoming a well-educated young man, and we're getting into deep stuff here." The substitution of Schoenbergian atonality for the birds and the bees in a standard coming-of-age moment might be hilarious, were there any irony to it; as is, we are asked to accept it, and other such moments, straightforwardly. With its hopeful messagizing, its sprawling all-inclusivenss, its earnest profundity, Body & Soul reads like, well, a first novel: which, after all, it is. It's a good enough book, given what tends to get published. It just isn't a wonderful book. Harsh judgments are the reward for having once upon a time written a book a lot of people love.
BODY & SOUL
Frank Conroy
Houghton Mifflin, $24.95, 450 pp.
