False Match by Henry Bean, and: The Weather Tomorrow by John Sacret Young (review)

90 Western American Literature rescue her female characters from the most common western stereotypes and to present them as more enlightened and life-affirming than their male tor­ mentors, but her re-invented world looks suspiciously like a mirror image of the old one. It rises on the same adolescent fantasies of violence, extra-legal justice and heroism which inspire the male Western, with the sexes merely transposed. Its consummation replaces the sterile male bonding idealized by the code of the West with an equally barren lesbianism. Rather than truly free it seems to have been infected by the sick patriarchal world and to be as sadly limited in its own way. Fortunately, it is possible to overlook all grandiose intentions and enjoy Cameron’s novel as a Western enlivened by a reversal of sexual roles. DICK HARRISON University of Alberta False Match. By Henry Bean. (New York: Poseidon Press, 1982. 240 pages, $13.95.) The Weather Tomorrow. By John Sacret Young. (New York: Random House, 1982. 196 pages, $11.95.) These excellent, though very different California novels return to the beginning of the seventies, the cusp of the two eras. The values of the 1960s, that most exhilarating and disheartening of recent decades, were collapsing, to be replaced with those of a narrower age — our own. This is the ideal time to study men and women grappling with sudden transitions, trying to answer Robert Frost’s old question of what to make of a diminished thing. Thus it seems fitting that Bean’s study of the sad mutability of life be set in Berkeley, the locus of so much of the change of the sixties. Harold Raab, Bean’s protagonist, like the author himself, came to Berkeley from the East, and lived through the era of student demonstrations and the violent convul­ sion of spring 1969, when students fought police and guardsmen through the campus and nearby streets. In such a battle Harold first saw Shaw, one of his future roommates, throwing a gasoline bomb at a police car. Through strange accretions, Harold has come to live in a house with Shaw, Jimmy Wax, and Donna, a quartet whose love for each other is expressed indirectly through the movies they have seen and talked about together. Now, however, in 1970, Harold and his roommates already seem anachronisms, drifting toward the time when their circle of holdouts will collapse, and become ordinary people. Berkeley, someone will say, was just a phase in their lives. (The lines are finally spoken by underground filmmaker Jimmy Wax, who deserts for — of course — Hollywood.) In this atmosphere of impending collapse, perhaps as a romantic gesture against the fear of empty rooms which Reviews 91 haunts him, Harold conjures up Charlotte, a child of California who still believes in “the great ideologies of the sixties.” Charlotte is at first just a fragment of conversation overheard, then a name. Entering Harold’s note­ book (which is our novel), and next his life, the chance word becomes flesh. Harold gives her “the whole big pitch, Christ in the wilderness, Zarathustra on the mountain,” but in the end their love affair annihilates Charlotte’s marriage and the woman herself, and nearly destroys Harold. Their tortured relationship is a ritual leave-taking of all the blind idealism and lost innocence of the time Charlotte represents. The book is a complex, many-layered thing, a meditation on the “disease of narrative,” intensely literary and allusive, while at the same time brutally realistic, especially in the clinical details of love-making and of Charlotte’s illness (not for nothing is the author a doctor’s son). It is also the best evoca­ tion of a lost Berkeley that I know. Anyone who was there will follow Harold, Jimmy Wax, Donna and Shaw out of the Cinema and down Tele­ graph Avenue, recognizing every sight until they disappear into their house near, as I make it, Derby Street. (The standard disclaimer about resemblance to actual places must be considered another of Bean’s wry jokes and put-ons.) False Match deserves the PEN award it received, and more besides. The Weather Tomorrow is John Sacret Young’s second novel, and a far...