COOPER
Hilary Masters
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987
248 pp., $16.95
Hilary Masters' latest novel, and his fifth so far among seven books, is first-rate fiction. Lean and economical in both style and structure, it moves urgently forward without any wasted motion - especially the familiar wasted motions of self-conscious and showboat virtuosity or of trendy minimalism. It is, however, more evocative than exhaustive, thus allowing you, the reader, to bring yourself and your sum of experience to the story, inviting you to think and feel and judge as things go along. As intelligent as it is gracefully stylish, Cooper is concerned with problems that matter from the first time you meet them until the last time you see them. It is, then, that rare thing in our time, a novel whose appeal is more than merely aesthetic, a story that moves you as a complete experience. Thus it becomes a part of memory. Something to think about afterward.
Does all this sound like a book-jacket blurb? Good. In a real sense I mean it to. Hilary Masters, here and in his other books, is just too good to be missed. And chances are that you might miss him; for, with the exception of Last Stands: Notes from Memory (1982), his highly original autobiographical essay, his work has been missed by too many. How has that happened? It is a story in and of itself, and we shall have to deal with it (later) here. Writers, certainly publishers, and probably most readers really don't like to hear about those good writers who, for one reason or another or for many reasons, have not been as well known and as well honored as they ought to be. In this sense, the writers who have been overlooked tend to be like "the undeserving poor." It is almost a matter, a danger, of bad luck to bring them up. Even those who admire and support a really good writer like Hilary Masters continue to do so in the hope that this book or the next will surely be the "breakthrough" that will, at the least, confirm and validate their own good taste. There are very few people, in the literary world anyway, who are so unsophisticated as to hope that a change for the better will serve to bring a just, retroactive redefinition of the past. Like it or not, then, we are going to have to consider the hard case of Hilary Masters. But first it is more pertinent and cheerful to talk about Cooper.
Cooper is set partly in New York City and mostly in the quiet and dying (except for its summer house potential) little upstate village of Hammertown, a place not unlike Ancramdale, where Masters lived for years. Hammertown, past and present, and many of its people, was the unifying subject of Masters' 1986 book Hammertown Tales, a gathering of thirteen short stories. Cooper is, of course, entirely self-contained, but the reader who has read and enjoyed Cooper is well advised to seek out Hammertown Tales, whose stories will add to the experience with a wider and deeper "surround." Hammertown Tales, in the tradition of its small publisher (Stuart Wright), also happens to be as handsomely made a trade book as you are likely to find anywhere.
To Hammertown from the City have come Jack Cooper, who is a back-issue magazine dealer, and his wife Ruth, a poet, and their son, Hal, a retarded young man. Probably the main reason they have moved into the country is so that Hal can at once have a chance for a life of his own and the kind of privacy (and safety) city
...
Read Full Article
|
