Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties. - book reviews

National Review, March 24, 1989 by Joseph Sobran

We may, however, reasonably judge that Born B ers is in important respects less successful than its predecessor. From page to page, the new novel is as solid and pungent as a lumber yard; every character is firmly limned, every vignette makes its point, every detail is skillfully observed. But the overall design is confusing, and the aftertaste of Born Brothers is sour and disappointing.

The first Neumiller in America, Otto, came to North Dakota from Germany in 1881, made a respectable fortune in farming, lost money in the 1930s but remained solvent. It is perhaps symptomatic of the darkness of Woiwode's intentions that the most powerful scenes he has written are at the beginning of Beyond the Bedroom Wall, in which Otto's son, the elder Charles, builds a coffin and buries his father in unconsecrated farmland. After the strength, confidence, and serenity of these pages, the narrative descends at once into ambiguity and confusion, dissolving its atmosphere of legend and turning grittily naturalistic. The effect for the reader is rather like beginning a work by Hawthorne, which then is transformed into Dreiser, and ends up sounding like Norman Mailer or some other specialist in Contemporary Drab.

The Neumillers make their American debut in a Golden Age of strength, opportunity, dignity, and certitude. Edging into the mainstream of American society, however, they lose purpose and resolve. The present Charles, grandson of the coffinmaker, is not an easy character to understand or sympathize with.

A drug-and-alcohol-abusing former television personality, Charles has abandoned career and family, holing up in a squalid Chicago apartment house where he can drink and ruminate about his past. The reader may, with patience and ingenuity, learn that Charles's childhood and youth were difficult. Woiwode, however, makes only the murkiest connection between Charles's past life and his present disintegration. Beyond the Bedroom Wall tells us Charles is a borderline psychotic obsessed with suicide, but Born Brothers is less helpful. Charles is exhausted, in the accepted modern manner; he is also exhausting.

Indeed, through surfeit of sadness, the whole story moves toward exhaustion. In a family history there will occur births and birthdays, weddings and christenings, anniversaries and betrothals. This chronicle emphasizes deaths and funerals, which its author depicts in meticulous and shattering detail. As the older generations pass away, the story turns more garish, but at the same time it begins to sound hollow, like a shriek in a tenement airshaft.

Perhaps the trouble here is less a fault of Woiwode's design than of the quality of contemporary life. We must give the author credit for facing the problem, even as the hapless Charles attempts to do. "The plain details of each day, which are everybody's province, are the most important," he tells us, "since everybody must contend with them. When I think of how I've resisted learning from experience, I want to hide in a corner of the granary . . . and howl with the vow that I'll never again be that way; never drink, never lie, give pat answers, point out anybody's weaknesses, or fly apart like a ship torpedoed on its home run."