Book Review : The Beat Goes On--in a Fictional Way

In the Night Cafe by Joyce Johnson (E. P. Dutton: $17.95. 231 pages)

In a memoir, people and events appear because they were real. In a novel, they appear because they have to be real.

Joyce Johnson wrote a first-rate memoir several years ago. “Minor Characters” told of her young days as a middle-class student from Queens who, for a few years, became part--a small but wonderfully sentient part--of the Beat circle around Jack Kerouac.

Now, Johnson has written a novel with a roughly similar theme. The time is the ‘60s; the narrator is middle-class and from Queens, and has been drifting for a few years among artists and musicians. She meets a stormy, mesmerizing painter whose uncompromising abstract expressionism is no longer in demand in a market that is beginning to go Pop.

They marry and live together with a passion increasingly eroded by his drink and despondency. She sees him fading and can do nothing about it, other than love him, support him by working, and keeping dinner for him when he staggers home late at night. It is not long before he is killed riding his motorcycle, an accident with undertones of suicide.

However made-up the story of Joanna and Tom Murphy may be, it inevitably suggests a fictionalized memoir. Joanna is a photographer, but she evokes no voice or character other than a first-person recollection and lament. Murphy is a painter, not a writer, but his moody electricity, his outliving of his vogue, his decline and even his looks suggest Kerouac.

In any event, “In the Night Cafe” presents itself as fiction, and as fiction it is painfully thin.

Tom gets a brief childhood snippet as the unwanted son of a floozy mother married to a bullying second husband. He is given a rich first wife who is bitchy and fakey and goes home to Daddy, taking Tom’s paintings and their two children with her.

Other than that, he is the artist, first as demon lover, then as Demon Rum. Whatever charm, wit, character or talent he may possess, none of it comes across directly. We have to take Joanna’s word for it.

Joanna’s word, unfortunately, is pretty well worn. Take her account of meeting plangent at a party. Tom comes in out of the rain, coatless, wearing a sweater and a scarf. He had “a face that had been used a lot, fierce eyes set deep in smashed bone.” The eyes were blue, as well as fierce. He comes up to Joanna, asks “Why do you hang back?” and walks off.

This, she tells us, “suddenly seemed to be the entire painful puzzle of my life.” She leaves too. “I carried his question into the rain.” Later, sitting in a cafe, she sees him walk by “very slowly, still with no coat on, holding up his face like a blind man daring the rain to fall on him.”

Still later, they meet, plangent no longer, at the Cedar Bar. They walk and walk. “This is going too fast for you, isn’t it?” he asks. “We can’t slow it down, though.”

The lush tone is not kept up, fortunately. Joanna’s voice turns stoic, factual, even touching. But none of the downs--there are no real ups--of what follows seems to matter much except to her. Other characters, such as Tom’s brother, an old painter friend, a young painter disciple, drift in and out to little effect.

Nobody, not even the protagonists, has any real fictional need to be there. If they are there, we feel, it is only because they or their equivalents existed, and Johnson wants to tell us about them.

After Tom’s death, the book goes to bits and pieces. Joanna drifts over to Paris, works as a photographer and meets and marries a French film maker with whom she has a son, Nicky. The Frenchman is nice, but doesn’t stick around for more than a few years. He does provide support, though, and when he invites Nicky to visit him in California, he has the imagination to take the boy to the movies every night of his five-week stay. Now that, true or not, is a fiction-sized event.

So is a late chapter telling of Nicky’s extended stay in a hospital, and his effort to cope with, and understand, a deranged roommate. Nicky fears the other boy, but Joanna’s account of his effort to deal with his fear makes a small, perfect vignette in a book which, otherwise, is pretty much of a loss.