False Entry

It is a very simple matter to discern why I am the first one to even contemplate--most likely---a review of this book. If anything can be called "highbrow" than this book is it, and Ms. Calisher, past president of P.E.N. and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, who passed on earlier this year, expects no less from the reader than she does herself in terms of abstruse, yet precise vocabulary, fluency in Latin, French and German and the ability to follow with Pointillist detail precision descriptions of psychology and class, time and place and the men and women who live, move and have their being in England, New York and Alabama in a very serious mood indeed. The book has not one humorous moment. Need I say that after steadily ploughing through its nearly 500 densely packed pages, I feel as if I've read 2,000? Need I say that all this rather puts a strain on one? Here's the skeleton of the plot: Boy is born in England on Armistice Day in WWI. Boy moves to Alabama at age of ten. Boy has possessed a photographic memory ab ovo. Boy develops a habit - due to aforesaid mental ability - of entering into other people's worlds and then removing himself discreetly. He calls himself at one point, "the perfect unknown." His brilliance wins him a scholarship to a New York University. - It's probably NYU, but could possibly be Columbia. He never states the name of the university. There are various twists and turns: He testifies in a court case against the Klan in Alabama, serves w/ the U.S. Navy in WWII. He becomes independently wealthy. He falls in love with a woman named Ruth. The book ends after a return to England to revisit the gentry that raised him. But this work is emphatically NOT about plot. What it IS about I'm not quite sure. I am sure that it represents Ms. Calisher's attempt at a work of art - a very cold and austere one at that. But I'm not at all sure she succeeds. The first thing one notices is that she's more than a bit at war with Proust here, but she doesn't win. How can she when she titles chapters so directly from Proust's work? When she tries, for example, to lay down the precept that,"...But this is the world where the sadder of the unities can sometimes be not death but change." in an obviously contra Proust manner, Proust already has this ground covered. For Proust, change is death, death that we simply don't realise. In a particular passage, Proust wonders to himself and the reader which of our "selves" which have already died we picture existing in any "afterlife" - The "self" we were at age 10? 20? 40? 60? If I were penning a dissertation, I would say that the central motif here is Parmenidean, that is, in societal terms, man's attempt to maintain the status quo, through a photographic or eidetic memory, vs. - as Ms. Calisher puts it - "Two people sexually conscious of one another....Progression in some form it is, in whatever terms for the two are inevitable; the sexual clock, like any other worth c