HEIR.
By Roger L. Simon '64. New York:Macmillan, 1968. 147 pp. $4.95.
Lewis Mumford, in his critical volume on Melville, states that great themes produce great works. As an example, he cites the author's coming to terms with the social currents of spiritual isolation, personal terror, and child-like joy which form the historical vision of Melville's canon, and give it a legitimate position in the literature of prophecy - a literature which, still, seems peculiar to America and Russia. Mumford's hypothesis, with the assumption that talent is a donne, appears altogether remarkable at a time when the novel has become something of a reduction of its former self; when weak, flagging creatures pass as heroes, dragging their Angst through Herzogian canvases of self-pity; when verbal castrati pipe an inflated tune that simpers as style.
Heir, a first novel by a generously gifted and already sophisticated writer, Roger L. Simon, sweeps aside the pampered passages of contemporary novels, and restores to American fiction the prophecy, the social event, the psychic current which were contained in Hawthorne and Melville and which, if Simon's work is any sign, may yet survive.
It is a novel inspired by the savagery and chaos of contemporary urban America. Its protagonist, Marcus Rottner, is the inheritor of our culture, and becomes the perfect representation of what we have done, and where we are destined to go.
At 24, with an Ivy League education, a trust fund of considerable worth; with ah apartment whose living-room contains Louis XIII pieces and, among others, a Canaletto, Rottner is a new species of criminal: the vacuous vermin, a false sentimentalist whose moral apathy, rather than cunning, causes murder; whose spiritual banality is cancerous, infecting all it meets. His victims (or, in this case, victim) are those already crushed by their own boredom, living in the animalist euphoria of an eternal present, where sensation and event merge as one, producing a Hard Rock of emptiness, emotional Light- Shows in a void.
To help his girl friend overcome too large a dose of amphetamines, Marcus administers heroin. But the girl o.d.'s, and Marcus discovers that he has become a murderer. He stuffs her into the harpsichord in his living-room.
And the book begins.
For Rottner treats himself to the illusion that he is creative (appreciation and feeling being, to him, the equivalent of invention), and is determined to set his ignominy into a journal. The diary lasts seven days before Marcus dissolves, but his trial is continued by a friend, the humorless writer-cum-political-activist, Sigmund Ornstein.
In spite of the psychological proximity of the hero, author Simon gives us a grotesque and ironic vision of the society of the young, those who know who they're not, but have no idea who they are, and what they are becoming.
He has touched a vital social nerve. With wit, control, and elegance, Simon has fashioned ioneda work that is as stunning a portrayal of our times as was The Great Gatsby to Fitzgerald's. Unlike that romantic, however, Simon has a humorously ironic vision which not only forms the base of his objectivity, but is the reason for his death.
Mumford, upon reading Heir, would be happy.
A novelist, Mr. Geller is author of A VainThing, She Let Him Continue, and Pit Bull.
