Deep Cleavage

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE WONDER-WORKER by DAN JACOBSON 191 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $5.95.

South African-born Writer Dan Jacobson built a small but solid reputation dealing with what he knew best: the politics and heartbreak of apartheid, the sour loneliness of race supremacy, and love shattered by cultural collision, and the moral and intellectual conflicts of exile. Jacobson is now 45, and he moved to England permanently in 1954. Three years ago after the tread on these original themes had begun to wear a little thin, Jacobson seemed to take a fresh fictional start and produced his best novel. Called The Rape of Tamar, it was an ironic retelling of the Old Testament scandal about King David's daughter whose half brother assaults her and dies for the offense. The links between Tamar and The Wonder-Worker are stronger than they at first appear to be. Sexual obsession, the disintegration of a family, the linkage between love and hate are evident in both. But where the biblical background of Tamar lent grief and madness some heroic grandeur, Jacobson's new book is furnished with the banalities and trivia of contemporary life.

It is the tale of a nameless deranged narrator who sits in his room at an overpriced Swiss sanitarium and purports to write a novel about a demented dreamer named Timothy Fogel. The narrator's own story about his itch to transform his experience into art and the Fogel "novel" are offered in alternating chapters.

Fogel, the son of an immigrant sign painter and a halfwit shopgirl, is born in London and drifts through childhood and adolescence preoccupied with his special powers. He believes he can become what he observes--objects made of stone, iron, wood, glass. "The god he wanted to reach wasn't interested in words. Only in achieved states. Palpable transformations. He would be known only by those who had gone through them." Fogel's crowning obsession is the diamond. Acquiring some through a friendly burglar, he becomes a fanatical student of facets and crystallography, of refraction angles and cleavage planes. He is possessed by the belief that diamonds are an incarnation of God's cold, durable and eternal being. What Fogel cannot possess is Laurence's sister Susie. And what he cannot possess he destroys.

"Paradox Ahead." Yet it appears that Fogel's story never existed in a coherent written form. The insane narrator is eventually removed to a hospital for the criminally insane, and his father tells the police that his son's manuscript was nothing but pages of wavy lines, zigzags, dots, loops and dashes.

What, then, is the point? Author Jacobson naturally does not offer road signs: "Meaning 1/2 Mile," or "Slow Down, Paradox Ahead." The Wonder-Worker seems to be yet another modern parable of total cultural disintegration.

The crazed narrator's inability to write down his novel is actually a failure of language, which is man's unique gift and the carrier of his common humanity.

Both the narrator and his character Fogel are isolated shards laboring under the illusion that they are wholly formed vessels. But what could well have been an academic exercise is redeemed by compassion and craft. It makes for a pathetic but telling tale.

R.Z. Sheppard

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