Wasteland

So FAR as I know, there has not until this Harper Prize Novel been a novel which confined itself almost entirely within the limits of a patient’s conversations with his psychoanalyst, though analysis itself has had a considerable vogue in forms as diverse as Lady in the Dark, Arrival and Departure, and Spellbound. By its adaptation of an obvious but hitherto neglected technique, Wasteland invites comment on its method as well as on its story.

We begin in neurosis and inarticulate evasion, as John Brown, born Jake Braunovitz, drags his trouble fistful by fistful into the light. Saturday after Saturday we follow the unveiling of his insecurity: his lack of any sense of belonging, his shame in his Jewish family, his memories of poverty and a loveless home and the human weakness of his father and brother and the mistakes of his sisters.

It is a completely credible family, each individual sharply realized. The old harpy of a grandmother, dominating everyone until she goes off alone to die her own hard death in Palestine; her weak and dirty son, Jake’s father; Jake’s mother with the soft, startled eyes and the soft, startled thoughts and the gentle smile; Sigmund, their oldest son, middle-aged and defeated, regretting a lost girl and a lost job; Debby, a Lesbian, forced by the weakness of her brothers to assume more and more of the masculine strength needed to hold the family together; Roz, wanting warmth and love and winding up a waitress in a bar; Jake himself, a news photographer, drinking too much and tied to the home he half wants and half can’t stand.

These are people who, however revealed, are real and human; one of the clear virtues of the slow, uncovering technique employed by Jo Sinclair is that the people emerge in the round, and in a very real sense compel that understanding which amounts to forgiveness. We end by half liking most of this family, even the dirty old father, and we never for an instant doubt their realness.

Slow and sure and thorough, the analyst-office technique certainly is, and as a novel of character Wasteland will stand with Harper Prize Novels of the past. But it should be remarked that there are weaknesses as well as strengths in Jo Sinclair’s method. For one thing, there is the suspicion more or less constantly present that one function of the book is to justify and demonstrate psychoanalysis, and whenever that suspicion intrudes, the book suffers, the technique is like the epistolary technique of Samuel Richardson in its repetitiousness and occasional tediousness as well as in its ability to reveal character. We get the same point not only in Jake’s words to the analyst, but in the conversations with his sister Debby which he reports. Then we get it all over again in the analyst’s notes.

Sometimes we follow through pages to learn what an ordinary novelist uncluttered by the rituals of analysis could imply in a single paragraph. And finally, the ending is foreordained; there is no possible suspense, because from the beginning it is perfectly clear that the rather too naïve Jake is going to have his inarticulate questions answered, and is going to come to terms with his background and family. A novelist who adopted psychoanalysis as a method and then wrote a novel about psychoanalytic failure would be biting the hand that fed him.

How this story holds up as psychoanalysis I am not prepared to say, though I suspect that both the problems Jake comes in with and the solving of those problems are simplified for literary purposes. I suspect further that the whole method is open to doubt, because when it is oversimplified it becomes bad psychiatry, and when it isn’t oversimplified it becomes tedious storytelling. What saves Jo Sinclair’s book — what makes it, in spite of its method, a much better than average novel — is the success she has had in creating the people behind the shadowy figure of Jake. Probably no method which can offer that should be criticized very harshly.

WALLACE STEGNER