All the Clutter Gone

In a bold and comprehensive list of "The Year's Best Fiction," Time magazine includes this book and comments: "A businessman descends into the joys of collecting pre-Columbian art and gradually loses himself to his possessions."

In this sharp little tale, Mulbach, no expert in the beginning, needs to know more than he does to unravel the mysteries of his chosen and esoteric field of inquiry and to keep himself from being fleeced in a market oversupplied with fake goods and suckers to bid on them. No matter your business, profession, or hobby, you will surely recognize the of a bewildered amateur in a professional world. "It isn't comforting to acquire a little knowledge. Ignorance certainly is preferable."

Even if it were possible, are you quite sure you want to be a connoisseur? In a sham world: do you really want to risk identifying the genuine? Raise each artifact to your magnified eye, then; probe it with your sophisticated tools. Your final verdict must be dispassionate, objective — non-aesthetic. But the amateur, bless him, reacts with his instincts, foregoing the whole subject of authenticity by buying whatever speaks to his enthusiasm. The connoisseur is a classicist, the amateur a romantic. Connoisseurs live in a museum-like world of impossibly rigid standards; amateurs move through the confused, uncatalogued mess of their daily streets.

Fortunately, Connell writes of the amateur's cluttered attic of second-hand junk with the spare, classical control of the connoisseur. Muhlbach's random life is frozen here as if behind museum glass. All the clutter is gone; only art remains. For Connell, as novelist, knows that all artifacts will be genuine when the writing of them is. In a world of "little bisque figurines in department stores — Royal Doulton poodles balancing on their hind legs," the good novelist must be a connoisseur of cheap things. His art redeems all bric-a-brac.

Movie: Brecht's "Galileo," directed by Joseph Losey '29, "who knows more aboutBrecht and more about film than possibly any other director today (N.Y. Times).

THE CONNOISSEUR. By EvanS. Connell Jr. '45. Alfred A. Knopf,1974. 197 pp. $6.95.

Mr. Liman is an assistant professor of Englishat. Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where he teaches American literature andcreative writing.