Language Barrier

It's Tough Keeping Up With Jones

By Don Robertson

Perhaps James Jones had profound and noble intentions when he wrote his new novel, Go to the Widow-Maker (Delacorte, $7.50). Perhaps he really wanted to make a contribution to literature.

If this is true, then the book is more than appallingly bad; it is heartbreaking. For, say what you will, Jones can produce viable fiction. One of his novels, "From Here to Eternity," is perhaps the best study of Regular Army life ever written, and another, "The Thin Red Line," is a thumping good World War II combat study. But, when Jones is bad, he is so very, very bad and so very, very clumsy that the

reader is sickened and overcome by alternating waves of exasperation and pity. "Some Came Running," published nine years ago, was an example of this really quite remarkable badness. It was

about 1,300 pages long, and in it Jones declared total war on the English language.

But, compared with Go to the Widow-Maker, "Some Came Running" reads like Alexander Pope.

Here is an example of the new book's style:

There had been a time, back when he first got out of the Navy and came home had thought they were the and first met them, that he two most worldly and could ever meet. But they sophisticated people he hadn't gone on. gone on and had been going on, for quite a long time now, he had just not found up to now an idea, a place to go on to.

on. He had

Okay, so he has been going on. Great. And on and on goes Jones, for 618 pages and some 300,000 relentlessly illchosen words. Here is another example of the delights that await the reader:

Usually they met for

lunch to discuss and worked after, or met after lunch and worked through the afternoon till closing.

NEED MORE? How's that again? Were they discussing their lunch? Were they discussing their work? Ah, but perhaps they were discussing ways to assassinate the language. Who knows what secret thoughts lay in Jones' mind when he wrote this book . .

There is also a “suffocated to death" in this book, and in. the opening paragraph he uses the adjective "dilapi-|

.*

dated" twice in one sentence and calls a swimming pool "deserted" when two men are standing next to it.

So much for the style of this remarkable novel. Now

then, what is he trying to say? Can it be deduced? The

answer is yes. It most definitely can be deduced. Jones is telling us that there are certain physiological dissimilarities between boys and girls.

LUCKY ONE The protagonist is named Ron Grant, and the a playwright novel addresses itself to his relationship (quasi-homosexual) with a fat skindiver

named Al Bonham. Most of the book is set in the Carib without exception profane, bean. The characters are

gross and stupid, and of course Ron Grant is the most profane, gross and stupid of them all.

But Grant is not the novel's! most ludicrous character. That honor must go to its heroine, a girl named Lucky Vivendi who tells Grant (on) their first date at that!) that she has slept with 400 men. Some conversational gambit, yes sir, you bet. Ah, yes, the Town Bum as Heroine. May

the Almighty have mercy on

us all.

There are many other altogether unpleasant and unbelievable types who inhabit the fetid pages of this novel, including Grant's 53-year-old "mistress" and another skindiver who has the astonishing name of Grointon.

Jones is a man of abilities, and some editor should have had the courage to tell him to try again. Instead, a great disservice has been done to a man who should have been told the truth.