James Schuyler

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Business and Dishes

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Like his last novel, A Nest of Ninnies (co-authored by John Ashbery), which is set in the immortally uneventful Kelton, New York, [What's For Dinner?] also presents an easy and humorous middle-class world betwixt shopping center and commuter train. The sense of well-being, however, is very shortlived in What's For Dinner? Buoyancy, wit, a poet's ear for the way various people talk—all of Schuyler's strengths serve here to thicken the gloom of the psychiatric ward, where a third of the story takes place. A boozy housewife, Lottie Taylor, clambers onto the wagon, befriends other hospitalized suburbanites, comments on the sundry, unpleasant effects of personality-altering drugs, and subjects herself to the sadly loony twaddle of group therapy. Another third of the story is devoted to Lottie's neighbors…. The third third relates the attempt of an interloping widow … to make off with Lottie's husband…. In short, Lottie's husband philanders, her neighbors gossip, her fellow inmates bicker.

This is the stuff of soap opera, but Schuyler has given it tight, comic form, carefully resolving all the subplots, even the bitter ones. It is a novel entirely of external characterization—nearly the whole thing is dialogue. It is the surface of life that Schuyler is after; the deliberate, yammering silliness of these characters persists through the tragedies of their lives, and in the end it makes them more than ninnies and even helps them endure…. There is no booming on about the meaning of it all; in What's For Dinner? everything begins and ends with what people say about it, even if the situation is very serious and even if what they say seems improbable nonsense. Such is Schuyler's method of characterization, strange and severe, limiting the scope of the characters as they themselves have limited their own lives.

This method does not admit of those messy moral investigations that fill the pages of so many novels. Schuyler does not delve into the horrors of mental illness or the ethics of locking people up; he skirts the issues, but in such a way as to indicate that this is exactly what happens out in those suburbs. It is an essentially poetic approach: the form suggests the content. Indeed, the entire novel follows a poet's idea of form. Scenes alternate like strophes, and most of the devices designed to handle content novelistically are missing: the narrator has no personality, the characters no history, the action no real rise and fall (it's just a straight line to a resolution, largely dealt with offstage), and the prose itself—a precise selection of words and epithets—is fairly un-visual. Instead, everything comes through the ear. The characters are mere voices, but ingeniously consistent voices—they have the consistency found in life.

What's For Dinner? does have, however, some of the deficiencies of that delicate hybrid, the poet's novel. It is sometimes wan. The vigor of struggle, of overcoming obstacles, is conspicuously absent. Lottie and her fellow patients are all self-committed. They accept the social judgment that they should be changed and do not balk at what they must suffer in order to be restored to their living rooms, bridge games, and shopping malls—to what one patient calls their "business and dishes." Resistance is muffled in the continuity between life in the mental hospital and in these people's homes. The sense of desperation, loud or quiet, is much the same for all the characters, and is presumably the writer's judgment on ordinary real-life now. Yet Schuyler does not bludgeon us with this potentially clichéd notion; on the contrary, the unhappy similarity between an evening on the ward and at a neighbor's dinner table emerges subtly and of its own accord. Indeed, this could be said of all the quiet strengths of Schuyler's latest novel.

Eve Ottenberg, "Business and Dishes" (reprinted by permission of The Village Voice and the author; copyright © News Group Publications, Inc., 1979), in The Village Voice, Vol. XXIV, No. 29, July 16, 1979, p. 68.

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