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Show rV. t2 The Salt Lake Tribune, Sunday, November 21, rr 1971 Author Ross MacDonald fights to keep personality out of private By Peter Preston ishly, now MillarMacDonald sits in a Londo) restaurant and autographs a book his latest, The Underground for a pasMan, published last winier sing waiter. He speaks of his childhood with diffidence. The Manchester Guardian LONDON Author Ross MacDo- nalds private eye, Lew Archer, swims (endlessly through a soured ocean of dolefully divorced, perregret petually assaulted, inexorably unravelling the foul past of the beautiful peo- e pie. Hes Flip Maudlin, and black as the bleakest hangover. Author Ken Millar coins' a wry j phrase at least once a week," lives in extreme ecological gentility, never ad-- , t dresses a single ladies luncheon club ""and hasn't been to London for 35 years until now. Hes diffident, tweedy, down and buttoned up a quiet ' 4 Its a ciche (and a ludicrous cliche) to t jJiimeixcan from Santa Barbara, Calif, 4r think who he really is: Ross MacDonald. Ken Millar alias Ross MacDonald heir of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, star of Newsweek covers, Hollywood adaptations and slavering California Millar began with a couple thrillers but soon junked that . j d Dreaming Form to Hammet He owes the form to Hammetts awareness. reviews in the New York Times. Sheep- - Hammett, but iaracters have no "internal California is integral to Ross MacDonald. So is the intricate mesh of the past. No character in any Archer novel exists purely in the present. Every man has a guilty secret, every woman a furtive lust. Every distant act comes home full-tim- e 4 as being too narrow, too quickly redundant. By definition, the political basis changes as political forces change, he says, and anyway, private lives are more interesting. The American detective story, lie swears, does not constrict his absorption. Rather, like Elizabethan tragedy, the corset of convention sets emotions free. Not too much is made of the battered, itinerant beginnings in a hundred lodging houses around the states, deserted by dad and succored by a mother always California dreaming. MacDonalds own psychology never comes too pat in print and he fights the temptation personally. So the Oedipus legend haunts his work. So what? The realest time, for him, seems the past 25 years and 23 books of authorship. Margarpf, his wife, writes in the morning; he writes in the afternoon. In longhand, three pages a day. Has he bought anything in London? No. I dont need anything. Millar, with shuffling modesty, says he needs very little though he likes his swimming pool and more money. -' of spy e gc-nr- roost across the brpadth of years. I know this, Millar causality is almost tragic situations, evat once." Arent the to But I believe this. says. The web of infinitely exact. In erything comes up ' darkly webby plots too matically coincidental? Wheels, by Arthur Doubleday and Co., Ilail-e- y; $7-9.- Exactness may never want to buy car again after Arthur Haileys reading Wheels. The author of AirYou an American and Hotel did his port homework during his stay in Detoit, where he was a celebrity and thus was informed of many of the American auto industrys obscure workings. Wheels covers all of its facts and even gives you a good idea of how an auto dealership can con the hell out of average car buyers. Newark rioting report boasts mockingU title No Cause For Indictment, by Ron Por&mbo; Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 398 pp.f $8.95. newspaperman in writes Newark what he calls an autopsy of the city based around events before, during and after the 1967 ghetto riotthe all too familiar big ing city scenario then of looting, burning and killing in the crossfire of snipers and police. A young ders his indictment seamy treadmill of prostitution, drugs and crime of the poverty-stricke- Central Point His central point is the assertion that lawr officers have escaped culpability for wanton and vengeful violence that may have resulted in killing while attempting to keep the lid on the city. Thus, tlw title, mocking representing the end result of numerous official investigations into alleged police brutality. A Black Major change in the citys administration w ith election of a black mayor still leaves the author with only disillusionment. And he ren A subsequent concluding : rThe mayor found himself a of the business and real estate interests that concaptive trolled Newark. Black politicians were as disinterested as their worthless white counterparts. The enemy now came in ali colors for the residents of black Newark. Douglas L. Parker. Paperlach Strings Vignettes The author strings together vignettes of the black ghetto and corrupt or indifferent iticians. Porambo certainly isnt working for the chamber of commerce as he writes of dismal black housing, schools and medical care, and the own high-power- multi-millio- n Real People The characters include an e auto plant executive whose job eventually destroys him, a ghetto black caught up against his will in criminal plant activities and a rising auto executive whose work leaves little time for his pretty young wife. They arent portrayed in depth; Hailey writes them up as cogs in the industrys machinery while describing its workings and how its power to life's everyday extends levels. The young wife, for example, turns to shoplifting for excitement, and Hailey suburbs the posh where auto executives live and have their own police ces in order to handle such bored women more discreetly than would the Detroit police force. No publicity or scandal is desired, and rank lias its pi ileges. The Orion old-tim- high-pressu- Eat SdLs FICTION an Englishman Delderfield. the few practitioners of the novel does it generational with considerable American aqain popularity. 2. Rich Man Poor Man. Shaw. America in the 40s and 50s told with Irwin Shaw's usual readability. 3. Summer 42. Raucher. Kids discovering sex during summer vacation and. yes, there's a wise, older woman who is the initiator. 4. The Crystal Cave. Stewart. A nice retellinq of the Merlin-Arthu- r legend done with a skillful sense of the period. 5. The Child From the Sea Goudoe Elaborate but tame embroidery on one of Charles Il's rea'-lit- e mistresses, Lucy Walter. God One of 1 Is GENERAL Future Shock. Toffier A well researched but popularly written bit of fu. urology, emphasising the psychic crises of change 2 The Greening of America Reich Me professor who happens to like the kids prophesies a peaceful revolutionary change in America. 3 Inside the Third Reich Speer Hitlers production chief tells hs memories of the boss; an excellent look a Nan and. 4 Boss. Royko. All about Mavor Daley of Chicaqo and if is a scathing b veteran a portrait Chicago newspaperman. 5 An escape Papilion. Charriere. story to end all escape stones by a Frenchman who busted out of Devil s Island, among others (Copyright) But comes piece about on the whole off as the most of fiction ever the U.S. auto Wheels incisive written industry of Form Those books might contain the most compelling cast, the wisest gags, the most perfectly evoked scenery, but theyre not his best, he agrees. It seems bizarre that a writer who can knit rets of menace and classical tragedy should wilt because of an idiotic detail, should skip in a trice from Turgenev to Her- - tioned throughout the book Orion may sound silly. But Hailey knew auto makers have endless lists of names for future cars, and he had to pick a name which likely wont be used in the fu- the ture. This analysis is based on reports s obtained from more than 125 in 64 communities of the United States. This Last Weeks Week Week on List FICTION The Day of the Jackal. Forsyth 2 2 Wheels. Hailey 3 3 The Exorcist. Blatty 4 Message from Malaga. 4 Macinnes 5 Theirs Was the Kingdom. ' 5 Delderfield 9 6 Bear Island. MacLean 6 7 The Other. Tryon 8 The Shadow of the Lynx. 1 2 The result is both informative and Interesting enough for people vvholl pick up a paperback copy, say, at Kenedy Airport for light reading. Finished with it, theyll look at a car and see a lot more than sheet metal. Daniel A. Jedlieka, Chicago 8 Holt 9 Death of the Fox. 10 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Garrett GENERAL Any Woman Can! Reuben 2 Bury My Heart at 1 Wounded Knee. Brown Eleanor and Franklin. 4 Lash Beyond Freedom and 3 Dignity. Skinner Honor Thy Father. Talese 5 Without Marx or Jesus. 6 Revel 7 The Gift Horse. Knef Tne Ra Expeditions. 8 Heyerdahl The Last Whole Earth Catalog. Portola Institute 10 The Sensuous Man. "M" Cmdr. Prbee, Simon & USN: A Novel of by Janies Bassett; Schuster, $7.95. In war, each man confronts the question of fear and courage in his own way. It cannot be avoided but it is never a simple matter. The protagonist of Janies Bassetts new novel, Cmdr. Prince. USN: A Novel of the Pacific Wai, hao risen in War II Navy the Annapoa lis graduate, bright, natural staff officer, an attactive bachelor, a great hand at parties. But the war charges all that Cmdr. Princes is given a combat command, a flotilla of archaic destrovers in the Java Sea, symbolized by a The : n uj. ViuuUi iiib tvogotiiji Usii 11140 bitip and later another. Cmdr Prince must fight two enemies: the Japanese, and the haunting clammy fear that gnawed (as always) at his own guts, Best Traditions of Sea pre-Worl- d cro-fulo- paint-peelin- g four-pipe- r; v But this is not solely an introspective novel. In the best tradition of the novels of the seas, Moby Dick and the Hornblouer seiies, the narra tive proceeds on manv levels: Action and character, history and the best of adventure, plot and symbol. As Ahab had his white whale and his Ishmael, Prince has his Davidson and his Cmdr. Monk, a British liaison officer nicknamed Beaver (for the beard he grows to cover scars of a burned face). Bassett knows these seas and knows the period, as he lias already demonstrated in other novels, including In Harm's Way.' Few writers have achieved so complete an evocation of Navy life and the realities of battle. Yet this work burrows deeper in the hart of the matter, a mature and penetrating book and one incidentally which suggests that Bassett is not yet through with Cmdr. Prince as a one-boo- 1984. ty: The masterful novel he wrote as a dying man has become not only a reference book for modern politics but also is reflected in our daily speech. It is more than startled nerfatalism pushing vousness that has out optimism many Americans convinced that much of the prophecy of 1984 is being fulfilled. We say 1984 has arrived when a politician talks to us in what Orwell called double - think : win peace by killing people, free men by controlling them. n Pacification, Circa 1946 Does the following, written in an essay by Orwell in 1946, ring a familiar bell, pealing their loudest beat in 1984. So long as I remain alive and he said in Why I well, I shall nontinue to Write, about prose feel strongly style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. Windowpane Curiosity Orwell was the rare liberal who believed that a thinking man should also be a thoughtful man why bother to save mankind unless you also save the poor widow next door from eviction or starvation? But he also had a windowpane through which everything alive was given curiosity Mormon history awards aired a awarded Brigham Young University history professor and a staff member of Historians the Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-daSaints, top prizes in its annual book and article competition for the past year. Prof. Gustive O. Larsen of BYU's history department, was presented with a S30 The award for his book, Americanization of Utah For Statehood and Dean C. Jesse was awarded $20 for his artiThe Writing of Joseph cle. which apSmith's History, peared in BYU Studies, for the Summer of 1971. y - tories. Suddenly the technologies of the past are no longer sufficient. At Pearl Harbor the U.S. fleet is decimated. At Singapore, in the Philippines, in the Netherlands and East Indies, great dreadnoughts are sunk, planes are destroyed and the allies are left with a handful of ancient ships, no match for the Japanese fleet. through to his deepest self. In the twilight of that wartime year of 1942, the chances of decrease. The fears turn from anticipation to reality. It is a measure of the maturity of the book, that Princes real challenge does not come in a simple way. y Indeed, lie leads his division to a off Borneo. vic-toi- Seek (he Ylhaie A But the disabled flagship Davidson, d left undestroyed in Surabaya, is by the Japanese and refitted. Though no one directly blames him and. according to the book. Prince has discharged his duty, he knows that Davidson was the test. In a climactic g chapter, the destroyer returns as an enemy vessel to hant him. He must Time for Testing It is precisely a time for the testing of men. And in this test, Prince is an ideal protagonist. There is more than a in his character, a little character. J i i I iuiLiil iOi iiibuiUiuib iimsUcu iFOH! laid Fact and Fiction In his somewhat calcuIf the central characters are fietuii, lated air, his hauteur, his detachment, the generals and admirals are the he manages in peacetime to susactual fgures of the time, givirg tain the illusion. Eut the war strikes to added verisimilitude. But they are the the secret places, his relationships older men; their ordeals and rites of with men and women, his fitness as an officer, his identity. passage have been accomplished. Tor Prince, Lt. Rodnev and a score of Those who come close to him, the others, mustangs and regulars, attractive Dutch girl Saskia and the and wonders, the courageous Englishman, Beaver, cut m actor-fathe- k vA. 1803-190- 5; ago the radio was blaring out such compositions as The Hut Sut Song, and Flat Mairzie Doats, Foot Floogie With a Floy The Mormon History Assn, countryside, strength, safety and security are shattered by a succession fo Japanese vic- 0 Flashes of Merriment, Century of Humorous Songs in America, by Lester S. Levy; University of Oklahoma Press, $12.50. Lofty Sentiments? (Copyright) has Vietnam? in even now Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the the cattle machine-gunnethe huts set afire with incendiary bullets: this is called Pacification. Little wonder we read 1984 and go no further into Orwell. After such calls as this,- what tiuth could be left? In Orwell's case, plenty. Any number of his other works contain rhythms of clarity and style that reached test takes place in the immediacy of war, in nations whose illusions of 4 A Orwells 1984 not his sole effort - 0r A 0. cap-tuie- seek out his own white whale. Bassetts novel is not only exciting reading but like all good fiction it echoes long after the book is finished. That quality, rare in today's fiction, makes this a worthy and rewarding readin gexpetience. i hope we see mote of Cusiis and I expect we shall. Robert K i r s e h, Isis Angeles Times. 00, y 04 A., 0 self-awar- d Manual aids Ok. 0, 4000 consumers buying cars Saint or mountebank, Man of many dimensions By Colman McCarthy Washington Post Writer Like WASHINGTON Kafka and The Trial or Melville and Moby Dick or Joyce and Ulysses, George Orwell now sits on many identik shelves with a full-tim- e Rock lyrics silly? See Flashes of Merriment A generation Bassett s sea novel leaves lasting impression of war the Pacific War, For once in my life I had nothing and wanted nothing. Then the thought of Sue fell through me like a feather in a vacuum. My mind picked it up and ran with it and took flight. I wondered where she was, what she was doing, whether she'd aged much as she lay in ambush in time, or changed the color of her bright head. Archer lives and expands. Thrust him back again fast before he is Ja nes Those who think the popular songs of today make no sense should realize that at least they are carrying on a long tradition. Cur Gang. Roth Sun-Tim- grave-digger- Bond, a mindless compendium of lova ble quirks and not the filter of a honed mind. Only over lunch do the incongruities blossom again. You hear of the fight against the Santa Barbara oil slick. The fight to keep Army Ordnance Corps out of a sweet, small creek. Santa Barbara, population 70,000, boasts three hundred writers. He wont drive a car more than a few miles. His wife Margaret hasnt been to Los. Angeles since I guess you could say Ken and I 1965. lost our political illusions in 1952 with Adlai Stevenson, Margaret volunteers. We had a victory party ail arranged then. Nobody dreamed he could lose. All our friends were there, and then the first results came in. sees the Millar, intensely soft center all right. But perhaps the flaw spreads wider than his secluded patio. For whenever did the good, guy play God and soggy, win? Is Lew Archer more than a wrecker with a wry grin and tattered ideology that refuses to die? e Uer5 New York Times Service because Hailey left few stones unturned in discovering what makes it tick. The name of the exciting new car men- eule Poirot. But the exactness of the form dominates. What are the limits of Lew Archer? A void, a nothing? In a sense, Millar detecsays. A seeking intelligence, a detive in the abstract. Archer is a investhe needs almost He man. prived other tigative activity. He lives through novelist. of the shadow the He's peoole. Is Archer doomed forever as an acrid Millar ? nullity, the eternal reaches for a copy of the Boomsters and reads the final paragraph, softly, aloud : Incongruities Blossom Traces American Songs Eest 1 One wonders why Hailey took so long in writing about this powerful industry, where fact is more fascinating than fiction, where a best seller's sex, ingredients abound intrigue, glamour and ruthless executives makdollar deing cisions ultimately based on gut feelings. And there's little fiction ,n Wheels. Hailey writes of super-secrcar styling stuof methods dios, spying bewilamong competitors, dering logistics involved in making a new model, nasty confrontations and the nearly unbelievable difficulties involved in just getting cars built With some quality. To an outsider it's fascinating stuff, and this reality is mainly what holds reader attention. Anyone owning a car would be interested in at least some of the material. Described in fine detail are the huge auto plants jungles, where relentless asreally sembly lines drive men to drugs, where shoddily built cars ' are made on Mondays and Fridays when the absenteeism- rate is high because workers cant take the incred-ibl- e noise and monotony five days a week. too dog- But there are no coincidences in life or in my books. There are no coincidences and I alleviate that by detail. He defends his plotting with sudden heat. Perhaps nobody ever followed a Chandler plot; perhaps you take the contortions of an Archer last chapter on trust. But the complexity of relationship between events and people is his dominant theme; the complexity is the plotting and its validity is crucial. One mentions one or two stark improbabilities to him from The Underground Man" among others and he bows meekly. llailev does homework Wheels crashes into auto industry exat, eye thrillers entry. Like Whitman and Tolstoy, Orwell knew that two men fought within. If you look into he asked your own mind, himself and the reader, which o are you, Don Quixote or Panza? He answered: San-ch- Algmost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. Orwell's fat man generally stayed leased, with only occasional breakaways to foolishness. Bern in 1903 and dead in 1950, he went to preparatory school and on to Eton. He traveled ' to Burma at 19, worked five years as a policeman, and on seeing British rule as a tyranny, soon saw himself a part of it the grimmest part since he was asked to club the luckless criminals and keep order on the streets. Floy. But even earlier there were songs lauding such lofty as Keemo, Um Skit A Rat Trap Kimo, La Didily Idily Si Si Do, Umti Uti ay, and Zizzy Zee Zum Zum Zum. Not to mention T Ra Ra Boom De Ay. About 100 of the songs of the 19th Century are included by Levi S. Levy in Flashes of Merriment, just published by the University of Oklahoma sentiments Press. Topic Division Levy divides his songs, each with words and complete music, into the comic tale, men and women, dialect, nonsense, history, animals, and drink. Some of these still are fairly well known (Pop Goes the Weasel, Captain Jenks of the Horse Marines, and The Band Played On) while others are much more remote ("Could I Only Back the Winner and The Blonde That Never Dyes.) Great Nostalgia Levy packs a greaf amount into his book although for some people today it is nostalgia once removed. And, as he says, Much of it is amusing even today . . . But this is not to say that anyone hearing the old songs now for the first time will double up w'th laughter. But the might well have doubled up with laughter to hear teenage squeals of delight provoked by a longhaired Britisher yelling unintelligible words into a B. Donald microphone, Thackeray, UPI. of nostalgia Only Guilt to Lose Orwell came back to England dazed by a bad conscience and stirred by a haunting remembrance faces of docked pisoners, begging peasants he away, of servants he physically beat. With no money and nothing to lose but his guilt, he sought out the poor and stepped on into the slums of Paris and London. What I profoundly wanted at that time, he later wrote, was to find some way of getting out of the respectable world altogether. In his own life, Orwell had struggled against the money god, but he appreciated the virtues and comforts of people who worked and saved. At age 42, royalties at last providing some security, his wife died, leaving Orwell with a small adopted child he cared for with whole tenderness. The jmage is strange. This genius, restless and alone, scared and worried about the atom bombs, the ascendant power of scientists, the decay of language; but. amid all these concerns, including the writing of 1984. earing for a child. What should be made of that? Perhaps only that Orwell had won out against the fat man within, a victory that is crucial for everyone to try for, even if we are the only ones to celebrate in our dying days with a it child who knows nothing of our struggle. fflUGD 14 I Nader always will be bered fondly by American automobile owners for one thing: He kicked Detroit in the tail pipe and made it stick. And while we wait for the manufacturers to start building safer cars, we can defend ourselves with What To Do With Your Bad Car: An Action Manual for Lemon Owners, by Nader, Lowell Dodge and Ralph Hotchkiss (Bantam, $1.50). Two Years Earlier Nader and compatriots carefully explain what to look for in buying a new car, and most important, what to watch for on taking delivery. 4H(,-I4(- .! - Warranties .(and lack of them) are explored in detail. An entire chapter is devoted to tires, perhaps the worst culprits on new egrs. New Junkheap And if you still should end up with a - lemon, several strategies are outlined. You can go to the dealer, then to the manufacturer and if that fails, to a lawyer. (One disgruntled buyer towed his spanking new junkheap to a major automobile show and to broadcast its proceeded many defects.) - The appendix includes keys code marks tires names and addresses of automobile executives and excerpts of laws protecting the consumer, among other valuable reference information.- Henry Kisor, Chicago Daily News. ' to MS .ist J st ''all lake Ralph remem- ( ity. South Utah |