Modern Mind
[Morton is an Austrian-born American novelist, historian, biographer, critic, and educator. In the following mixed review, he finds that while The World Above is rich in evocative details and acute observations, Polonsky's characters become conduits for a dogmatic political philosophy that he feels overshadows the literary merits of the novel.]
[The World Above] is a huge, restless book attempting to give scope to the spiritual bafflement which has overtaken Western civilization today. Mr. Polonsky has charged—and partially smothered—his second novel with much of the modern mind's burden.
The central figure is a young psychiatrist named Carl Myers. From the very outset we find him in an intensely up-to-date dilemma: brilliant but impoverished, he strives for the objectivity and humanitarianism of science in a ferociously competitive climate. The story of his double-edged fight—for worldly recognition and against the means by which he must seek it—is essentially the story of this book.
The World Above follows Carl's career through many places. We watch him struggle out of the tenements of New York's East Side; we see him waiting and busboying his way through Hopkins and Harvard, studying at Vienna, participating in the second world war. His soul, however, remains a battleground between ambition and principle. It is only as the chief of a large hospital that, in a convulsion of courage, he sees himself becoming a true physician, however fumbling, to all humanity. At last he also finds personal fulfillment in the woman he loves.
Carl, however, is exceptionally strong. He alone, among the main characters of the book, can prevail against the abrasive challenges of our culture. His friend, David, a latent homosexual, cracks under the desperate endeavor not to be himself. Sandy, Carl's quick, sensitive mistress, grows blunted after her first contact with wealth. His brother, Bill, becomes an anonymous casualty of the big war. And Curtin, Carl's jovially dynamic colleague, sells himself in the end to expediency.
Mr. Polonsky relates the lives of these in rich detail. Being a perceptive observer, he has much to say. And he says it well. I will not soon forget his ability to render the texture and immediacy of mental states or to reproduce the cunning of paranoia.
But this book is never as good as it should be. The people in The World Above behave spontaneously only in intervals. They have a habit of falling into the same uniform eloquence that reduces them after a while to becoming mere channels for a near-Communist philosophy; a philosophy born of a narrow intellectual bitterness which sees only the conditions that caused it, not the full consequences that would attend its success. The imposition of so inelastic and twisted a viewpoint also flattens the figure of Carl, though the phases of his development are individually well depicted, they do not coalesce into a satisfying portrait.
It is unfortunate that a book of considerable literary virtues should have such drawbacks. Mr. Polonsky's remarkable verbal power never forsakes him. Too often, however, his poetry is stymied by his dogma.
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