Irving's World

By James Atlas

UNCLE

by Julia Markus

Houghton Mifflin; 170 pages; $7.95

Philip Roth proved that New Jersey, summer camp and a claustrophobic family life could inspire brilliant satire. Whether they could inspire tragedy remained in doubt until Julia Markus addressed herself to the theme of growing up Jewish in Jersey City. Tragedy requires the decline of a hero, and Markus has invented one--however low key--in this somber, eloquent novel: Irving Bender, the son of East European Jews for whom the immigrant dream of success had come to nothing. "Irv's father drank and gambled and died," she writes in her terse idiom. "The mother got along; she got along. Education was life to his mother."

Mindful of this injunction, Bender quits school and goes to work so that his indolent brother Babe can have a college education. But Babe is fated to fail in business, while Irving succeeds as a bootlegger during the Depression and later as the owner of a summer camp in the Poconos. Surrounded by unpleasant, thwarted people--his troubled niece, his grasping, self-pitying mother--Bender ministers to their emotional demands and grows old alone.

For all its brevity, Uncle captures the duration of a life: the young man loitering in coffee shops and listening to radical debates; his flourishing business career; his later years, when he lies beside a pool in Miami pondering the ultimate adversary: "If the American dream ever lived on Stegman Parkway, it entered Irv's heart as an unacknowledged optimism about the mechanics of time." Only in old age does he learn to mourn his own mortality. "We are making something out of nothing," he cries. "And what we are making is no good."

If Irving Bender seems an unlikely hero, it is because he dwells in the midst of poverty--the poverty of faded tradition and of circumstance. Markus dramatizes this familiar condition with a laconic, willfully unliterary style. Her insights possess the character of aphorisms, translated into the sardonic, bantering idiom of immigrant Jews. "A lot you know," is the lesson Irving learns from his mother's death. When he invests in some paintings by an unknown artist who becomes famous, the novelist observes: "No one ever went broke seeing what was right in front of his nose."

Such grudging language achieves a cumulative power. Markus has a painterly sense of detail, building up scenes with a deliberate eye for the nuances of her characters' gestures and speech. Her vignettes of Camp Rose Lake, lingerie stores and Miami condominiums evoke a world where pride and purpose survive only by virtue of a resilient will. -- James Atlas

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