A Seagull Named Irving

THE WORD
by Irving Wallace
Simon and Schuster, $7.95

Enormously popular and richly rewarded, Irving Wallace is one of the Midas figures among contemporary American novelists: whatever he touches turns, in a manner of speaking, to gold. Or to put it less elegantly, he is up to his hips in the American pay dirt, shoveling it. Only the other day one learned from the New York Times that Mr. Wallace himself, rather than his publisher, as is usually the case, had disposed of the paperback rights to his next four, as yet unwritten, novels for the sum of two and a half million dollars. Meanwhile, his current novel, The Word, in its hard-cover edition continues to occupy a commanding place on the best-seller lists; for his less affluent fans there will soon be the paperback edition; and ultimately the movie, the TV version, the cassette, and so on down deep, deep into the pay dirt.

Art only seldom thrives in the pay dirt—too much gold in the soil?—and it should scarcely come as a surprise to find that art and The Word have little to do with one another. It is a surprise, however, to find that the storytelling, traditionally the best seller’s strong suit, and the mastery of the tricks of the trade, are here a good deal less secure than one might legitimately expect. The pace is sluggish, the dialogue too often didactic and expository, the narrative devices— those mini-flashbacks to the earlier parts of a sequence (Mr. Wallace is addicted to beginning in medias res and then catching us up)—are used with a mechanical predictability. Judged simply as a piece of storytelling, The Word is markedly inferior, for example, to either Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca or John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It would seem that what matters to Mr. Wallace (and his many readers) is the story he has to tell, rather than his manner of telling it, and the story, let it be said in the cliché it deserves, is a “big one,”a 576-page variant on what someone— was it Cecil B. de Mille? the Reverend Billy Graham?—once called “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”

Here let me turn for assistance to the unidentified blurb-writer at Simon and Schuster, who writes with a conciseness one wishes Mr. Wallace might at times have emulated: “In the ruins of the ancient Roman seaport of Ostia Antica, an Italian archaeologist has discovered a first-centurv papyrus, its faded Aramaic text revealing a new gospel written by James, younger brother of Jesus, the original source of the four gospels of the New Testament. The discovery offers the modern world a new Jesus Christ, a real man who lived and walked on earth, fills in the missing years of his ministry, contradicts the existing accounts of his life—and of his supposed death.”

In other words—to be precise, in Mr. Wallace’s words—this new gospel establishes “the irrefutable historicity of Christ,” and it is a mark of the author’s ambitions that, where a more cautious man might be content merely to describe and summarize, he gives us within the novel an ample selection of the actual words of the new gospel itself. (Quite legitimately, of course, for a novelist can do whatever he pleases, and, as we shall see, Mr. Wallace has a further sanction.)

“To the world at large—The Word—if it is genuine—will come as a revelation [I am quoting again from the unknown blurb-writer], a call to revived faith and hope in an age of doubt and fear.” Or, to quote from the reflections of the novel’s hero, Steve Randall, a public relations man who has been hired by a consortium of international publishers to spread the Word, the new gospel “would usher in a faith supported by James’s fresh picture of Jesus, and therefore justice, goodness, love, unity, and finally eternal hope would enter a materialistic, unjust, cynical, machine world spinning closer and closer toward Armageddon.”

The themes are grandiose, the style florid; a reader returning from twenty years on a desert island might reasonably have expected from Mr. Wallace the standard popular novel of “Faith indomitable and triumphant,” a latter-day descendant of In His Steps, and for a good part of the way that is precisely what he gives every indication of writing. Indeed, it is one of the peculiarities of The Word that it goes to great pains to convince us of the authenticity of the new gospel, drawing upon a good deal of earnest research in recent biblical, archaeological, and theological studies, and then, having done so over several hundred pages, proceeds to demolish it. The novel of faith, the best seller of yesterday, gives way to the novel of doubt, skepticism, and all-pervading contempt for the official institutions, secular and religious alike, that govern our lives. We are a long way from the uplifting novels of the late Lloyd C. Douglas.

A best-selling author such as Irving Wallace is more likely to act as a reflector than as an explorer: the ideas in his novels are certain to be congenial to his readers, for his ideas are already theirs. This, it seems fair to assume, is the true secret of his popularity. What gives The Word its special interest—admittedly a nonliterary interest—is the extent to which it mirrors and confirms the skepticism of the moment for which it was written.

We are living, as any number of us keep saying, in an ever-widening credibility gap. It is taken for granted that our leaders, whether in the government-business, or church-business, or the business-business, infatuated with the power their position confers upon them, will lie. deceive, cheat, and defraud, ostensibly for our good, in fact for theirs. That is the faith of the disillusioned multitudes.

So, in Mr. Wallace’s novel, the discovery that the new gospel is a forgery in no way dissuades the publishers and prelates, who have most to gain from it, from behaving as though it were authentic, the Word itself rather than, as it is, a gesture of revenge concocted (not too plausibly) by an ex-convict from Devil’s Island carrying on a vendetta against the Church. God is not mocked, but what, Mr. Wallace seems to be asking, if He is not there? It is a strange question to come upon in a novel of this sort, though it is camouflaged by a surround of those obligatory, clinically detailed sex scenes (as explicit as anything in Dr. Reuben), glamorous name-dropping of places, hotels, and restaurants (all of them familiar to the devotees of Temple Fielding), and some huffing-puffing, private-eye-like attempts at “breathless suspense.”

The literature of disillusionment that followed after World War I was addressed to what was, in the phrase of the period, “the civilized minority,” who found in it an articulation at the level of art of their own despair. A novel such as The Word, coming after a decade of Vietnamese war that has bred a virulent disdain for the pieties of church and state, is aimed at a much broader and less sophisticated audience, but one as attuned to it as, in their time, the early readers of The Waste Land and Antic Hay were attuned to them. It is the mass appeal of the negativism of The Word that is so enlightening. To each reader it says: Do your own thing— that contemporary translation from the Polonian (“to thine own self be true”)—for there is nothing else worth the doing.

Significantly, I think, that is the message, too, of Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the modest, sufferably coy, anthropomorphic fable of a seagull named Jonathan who refuses to do as the flock does and ignores the wisdom of the Elders, determined to fly on his own. It’s the book that has supplanted The Word at the top of the best-seller lists.