Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 10, 1990 TAG: 9006130478
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by DABNEY STUART
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
William Hoffman's tenth novel is a deft, engrossing tale of the complex relationship between two men, Amos "Pinky" Cody and Wylie Duval. Covering roughly the period 1934-1972, it takes place in West Virginia.
Wylie is the scion of a landed family whose forebears were successful entrepreneurs in coal, land and lumber. He grows up with silver-service dinners, he attends prep school and enjoys a European fling. After graduating from Washington and Lee, he becomes an increasingly prosperous stockbroker.
Conversely, Pinky comes from the "Wrong Side," a run-down section of town. His mother is a fundamentalist fanatic and his father an alcoholic veteran. Pinky has to struggle by hook or crook for survival. The intricate interweaving of their lives begins apparently by accident with a generous act of Wylie's father toward Pinky's. Coincidence is transmuted into fate when Pinky becomes general handyman at Wylie's father's office.
Through a series of carefully orchestrated incidents, Pinky begins a lifelong attempt to rise to the economic and social level that is Wylie's birthright. For a time he appears to succeed.
Hoffman complements this psychological odyssey by an equally probing treatment of the theme of good and evil. Pinky is raised in The Chosen of God church. On his way to becoming a prominent attorney and real-estate speculator, he gradually buries his stringent morality, going from a teetotaling prude to a social lion who holds his Cutty Sark with ease, from a man who defends the exploited to a manipulator of stocks and dreams. He never wholly escapes himself, however; his guilt and fear of God resurface powerfully near the end of the novel as his financial plans collapse.
Wylie, on the other hand, is characterized as an amoral recipient of life's bounty. The only interruptions in his gilt-edged, comfortable progress toward unusual wealth and eminence are caused by Pinky's impingements. For the most part he makes no decision on his own and at times seems a spectator reacting to his own life.
In a memorable confrontation near the close of the book, Pinky articulates the essential difference between the two characters. "When the Lord put you together," he tells Wylie, "he provided you with arms, legs, the best eyes, yet left out a moral sense." When Wylie tries to argue with him, Pinky continues, "Decency has nothing to do with salvation. The damned at least possess a conception of deity. What do you . . . godless men have to take before judgment - toothpaste, clean underwear, a graceful backhand?" He later calls Wylie "elegant sawdust."
One of the remarkable achievements of the novel is Hoffman's creation of two plausibly complex characters which he nonetheless restrains within the limits he initially establishes for them. Pinky and Wylie are, in short, always themselves. It is from the paradoxical interweaving of unmeshable destinies that the story's tragic consequences in part derive.
"Elegant sawdust" is reminiscent of T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men," whose world ends with a whimper. If Wylie has a soul - which, from Pinky's standpoint at least, is doubtful - the final paragraphs of the novel suggest that it is not simply damned, but perhaps fundamentally at one with the curator of hell himself.
"Furors Die" is a rich tapestry of contrasts embodied in the lives of its two main characters: affluence and poverty, labor and ease, passion and complacency, perception and oblivion, fear of God and indifference toward God. It is a splendid book, worthy of more specifically developed praise than this space allows.
Dabney Sturat teaches at Washington and Lee University and edits "Shenandoah."
by CNB