Advancing Paul Newman -- Part 3

Part 1 and Part 2

Much of Eleanor Bergstein's novel Advancing Paul Newman is difficult to read. For example, in Chapter One, Ila, Kitsy and Jerry are walking from a meeting to the hotel where Ila and Kitsy will spend the night. On the way, the three stop at a luncheonette. They are joined by two law students -- one white and one black. The reader cannot understand the following three paragraphs:

The black student began to talk about Howard somebody that crock of shit who sat with his feet in his desk drawer in Kirkwood talking on the phone and giving money to Big Flip who rode around with him in an open car saying “which side of the black face you want to see man” making him feel terrific while Carver and his boys who ran the whole North End couldn’t even get in to see him though they’d offered to let the Senator come to their clubhouse to answer questions.

“Hey you may not realize it” said Ila, “but you better get a press release out right away to the mass media explaining that none of it’s been the Senator’s fault the papers are full of stories about NAACP meetings being canceled.”

“listenabigailwaswithcorettathewholeweekforgettheprivateplanejazz” someone said wearily, as they all stood up and went to the modern hotel ...

Yes, the last paragraph does begin with that one long word.

Not all of the novel is such gibberish, but many passages are.

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Many pronouns are puzzling. For example, a paragraph that begins with an interaction between Ila and Kitsy. Then in the second sentence there will be the pronoun she, which might refer to either Ila or Kitsy. The reader has to study the entire paragraph carefully and even repeatedly to figure out who that she is.

Such pronoun confusion is too frequent -- maybe about once a page. It happens with she, her, he, his, it and its.

There are many run-on sentences lacking punctuation and capitalization. Examples:

The housing girl's a nut you'll stay with me we have our own bathroom

what do you mean you don't know why how can you not know why did you have anybody in the war did any family go to concentration camps?

I had a buddy in the army was a painter stationed in Germany you knew was married to a countess he met her in a bar at seven in the morning they got married two days later. He lived in New York too you know only I never knew him, he used to say above Fourteenth Street's a different city now he's married in Massachusetts, nice girl from Massachusetts they have a little handicraft shop you know souvenirs maple syrup little carving he paints in the back, so we're in the army and she says 'my wife I'm meeting her at the train I haven't seen her for two years, you want to come at nine in the morning.'

When Ila writes on a typewriter, she blathers with many typos and faulty punctuation.

I have always been prkne to vjolent flooding
I have always been prone to violent floodings of response that knok me off my feet, take me out of my mind ... out of all congrol. And ride with them.. the rest of my life is a training period so that when they come I am in enough control so that I can summon up all the extraordinarily disciplined other corners of my life and say to myself bear with me I know what I'm doing. otherwise to put logic and reason on the surge of feeling is impossible -- there's no reason to feel like thisyou did the right thing -- lists of reasons -- they don't count at all they make no difference and I don't approve of them either. I am not one for little jolts of feeling I am here and they are there. I remember riding on a hot Sunday on the train up to a country home.. I had a straw bad from Italy which had almost worn out mak ig my life cohesive.. my friend was brave and talented .. the other people around us less impressive.. and he said look at tht man in that window tithe a bottle and we were passing a row of tenament houses and my friend had always been afraid he would end up alone in a dingy room with a bottle ... and I coolly said .... yes the curtains are flapping outside like tongues.. and they were.. and I did not imagine myself in that bulding and feel a want of sympathy I can cover myself .. but otherwise I don't care at all ... and I do not feel a wash of sympathy.

I am guessing that Bergstein was strongly influenced as a writer by James Joyce.

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In Chapter One, Ila has arrived at a meeting and sees Kitsy on the floor.

And there in the middle of the people on the floor lay Kitsy, crying and twitching and moaning, her arms and legs jerking, mumbling "work to do … up ..." Jerry was kneeling beside her.

" ... that’s gonna be me tomorrow I swear to God if someone doesn’t get me those E.D. breakdowns from Roseburg” said someone in the crowd and someone else said

" …. her husband … killed in Vietnam a few months ago. ..."

Most readers would think that Kitsy's husband was killed in Vietnam a few months ago. However, in Chapter Three, the reader learns that the husband of the meeting's chairman -- not the husband of Kitsy -- was killed in Vietnam.

Did Bergstein mislead her readers about the dead soldier's widow on purpose?

In Chapter Two, the narrator mentions that Kitsy used to be married, long ago, to Jerry. The reader knows that Jerry is still alive. Did Kitsy marry and divorce Jerry and then marry some other man who was killed in Vietnam?

In Chapter Three, however, the reader learns that the meeting chairman's (not Kitsy's) husband was killed in Vietnam.

Didn't Viking Press assign an editor to this novel before its publication?

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I am reading this novel for the first time and am summarizing it as I go. I am not speed-reading it. I am reading a section and then writing a summary of that section.

After I read and summarized the novel's first two chapters, I had to go back to the beginning and reread it even more carefully and try to solve all the gratuitous puzzles. Who is she? What is it? What is an E.D. breakdown? How many times has Kitsy been married? And so forth and so on.

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Now I have read the first four chapters, twice.

The novel continues to switch back-and-forth between two time periods and will continue to do so until the novel's end (I peeked into Chapter Forty-Five.)

In my Part 4 of my blog series, I will summarize what I have deduced so far about the young years of Karen "Kitsy" Frank (i.e. Eleanor "Baby" Houseman).

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