Talk:Mile High (novel)

stuff from Time and NYT to put into the article

From Time magazine:

MILE HIGH by Richard Condon. 364 pages. Dial. $6.95.

"Books: Fish Cake with Mustache", Sept. 5, 1969

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901380,00.html

The hideous possibility exists that Richard Condon has committed allegory. This saddening and unlikely conclusion is what remains after the reader has discarded all ordinary explanations for Mile High. The fine, demented gleam in Condon's eye has become a glitter, like that of a health-bar sign observed through the bottom of a celery-tonic bottle. All who fondly remember The Manchurian Candidate and Some Angry Angel will lament.

Condon's great and nourishing strength has always been his mania for mania. The mushy midsection of the human-behavior range has no interest for him, and ordinary psychosis not much more. What grips his imagination, and shakes it till splendid words fall out, is the tic of a human bomb. In one novel, a beautiful woman feeds for 20 years on the high-held hope that she will one day, somehow, be able to chop up her lover with a machete. In another, a man sets out, in more sinister fashion, to learn by heart every last scrap of information the world contains about cheese. Even minor characters are wound up and whirring, their eyes empty and locked on apocalypse.

Mile High at first seems a normal Condon fancy. After growing up in turn-of-the-century New York with a good head for compound interest and the delicate ways in which money and muscle affect politics. Eddie West, the son of an Irish immigrant, brings about Prohibition singlehanded. His reason for doing so is that Prohibition will provide business opportunities. This is instantly understood by "the 18 greediest, the seven most hypocritical and the five wealthiest families in the country." to whom he goes for financing. It is also understood by an elderly and dignified Sicilian, who agrees that his society, the Mafia, will handle distribution of the alcohol that West's combine will buy up before the country goes dry.

Soon Eddie has enough political and financial leverage to engineer, among other entertainments, the election of Warren G. Harding and the stock market crash of '29. (One of his hired hands —a rather unsteady parody of the real Arnold Rothstein—amuses himself with the trivial business of fixing the 1919 World Series.) Somewhere in the middle of the corporate organization chart, Al Capone also works for Eddie.

This should be daft, glorious stuff, and West ought to lurch into life as a monstrously American folk villain, the match of such folk heroes as Paul Bunyan and Davy Crockett. If Minnesota's lakes are the hoof-prints of Bunyan's blue ox, why can't Warren Harding, Al Capone and Joseph McCarthy be the droppings from Eddie West's cigar?

Wrong Dream. They might be, except that Condon loses his balance and —odd for him—goes off the shallow end. For the first time in eight novels, he wavers from his delightful obsession that maniacal rigidity is civilization's main motivating force and therefore the only human quirk worth a novelist's attention. He begins to worry solemnly about what went wrong with the American Dream. One of the results is a lengthy mumble that goes like this:

"Prohibition fused the amateurism and catch-as-catch-can national tendencies of the early days of the republic with a more modern, highly organized lust for violence and the quick buck. It fused the need to massacre twelve hundred thousand American Indians and ten million American buffalo, the lynching bees, the draft riots, bread riots, gold riots and race riots, the constant wars, the largest rats in the biogest slums, boxing and football, the loudest music, the most strident and exploitative press with the entire wonderful promise of tomorrow and tomorrow, always dragging the great nation downward."

Maybe so, but why not send a telegram? Eddie West dies of Condon's sermonizing. The last half of the book develops a subplot involving West's compulsion to murder Negro women (his mother, who deserted him, was a very dark-skinned Sicilian). It is here that the dreary suspicion of allegory crosses the reader's mind. It may not be true that West is meant to stand for corrupt America, and the Negro women for America's blacks, but the book has been so mishandled by this point that no reader can be sure.

Condon just cannot be all bad, try as he will. Mile High contains at least one phrase that will outlast the century. Someone's face is described as resembling "a fish cake with a mustache." Condon should discard the rest of the book and rebuild on this foundation.