A Serious Man.

Jackson, Dennis

With A Serious Man, David Storey makes an astonishing return to a public spotlight that had dimmed for him over the fourteen years since his previous novel. A decade ago the critic Malcolm Pittock was speculating that Storey, once the most celebrated British novelist and playwright of his time, had reached a creative cul-de-sac because of his inability "to emancipate himself from a preoccupation with his own past." Indeed, A Prodigal Child (1982) and Present Times (1984) had suggested that Storey had mined the psychic terrain of his working- class Yorkshire youth beyond productive limits, in his art, and that he had little of value to say about "present times." Now, however, Storey has answered his critics by creating a compelling novel filled with little more than an intense "preoccupation with his own past," as his protagonist, Richard Fenchurch, rehearses the stages of his life that have led him, at age sixty-five, into mental breakdown. It is familiar stuff for Storey: no creative writer has ever evidenced more sustained fascination with madness and its representation in literature.

Fenchurch's life often parallels Storey's: the athletic son of a Yorkshire miner, he had forsaken his family to pursue his art career in London; but after winning major literary awards, he has fallen "out of fashion" as an artist and has crashed into depression and writer's block. Beyond that, it is treacherous to guess where the author's life overlaps with Fenchurch's.

For 359 pages, Fenchurch relentlessly dissects his bleak past: his guilt over having dabbled at art while his father labored down in the pit; his guilt over a clandestine thirty-year affair with his wife's mother Bella; his guilt over his broken marriage to Bea, who exacts justice for his infidelities by marrying a younger man; his despair over the suicide of his alcoholic second wife Vivienne; and on and on. He is conveyed back to Yorkshire by his daughter Etty, who hopes to help him regain his sanity and creativity (he has frequented psychiatric hospitals and been treated by doctors whose drugs and solutions he rejects). Unhinged by the death of his beloved Bella and his losses of Bea and Vivienne, he returns to the house where Bella lived and Bea was raised. Ardsley Old Hall is filled with memories for Fenchurch, who incessantly rehearses his past and discusses "things that count" (love, sex, art, education, work) as he pads about his native community talking to family, to strangers, and mostly to himself. Readers are challenged to track his mind as it darts in and out of the past-old conversations intruding on the present, visions of his daughter and granddaughters merging with memories of his wife and mother-in-law.

Etty warns him "not to dwell in the past," but that is precisely where he dwells; and if we are to believe Fenchurch, this mental journey back in time helps him feel "better" and "come full circle," so that, at novel's end, he can return to London to paint and write. But we have cause to doubt his stability: he is, as he declares, "a vocational liar" whose very life "is a fiction." The question of whether or not he has been healed is superseded by the larger one of whether or not he should be, whether or not his madness is, for him, a necessary mode of survival in a conventional world of people with "humdrum jobs and humdrum minds" that he so loathes.

A Serious Man is a substantial novel-entertaining, as funny as it is depressing, persistently engaging-and a stunning reminder that David Storey is one of the most imaginative British artists of our time.

Dennis Jackson

University of Delaware