Book Review : Traveling Through Miles of Dead Air

Ordinary Time by A. G. Mojtabai (Doubleday: $17.95; 223 pages.)

A.G. Mojtabai evokes the travel-death of a cross-country bus ride with the tormented precision of a dentist’s drill. She writes of a mother enduring the cicada-like demands of a restless child; of an old man declaring at a rest stop: “I step off the bus and my feet are tired already.” We feel the thousands miles of dead air, the stopped time, the heat rising off the Texas hardpan.

Throughout her new novel, “Ordinary Time,” Mojtabai’s writing is instilled with a disciplined passion to get things right. It is a humane as well as an aesthetic virtue; it is a sign of intelligent love, just as a splendidly ordered house might be.

Without Guarantees

But a splendidly ordered house is no guarantee of life within. In “Ordinary Time” the immaculate and often inspired quality of the writing does not quite make up for the lack of those brutal transactions that even the most refined novels require--think of Henry James--in order to be alive.

“Ordinary Time” portrays with entire integrity two heroic characters; both of them, as the title indicates, heroes of the ordinary. They live in a decaying Texas town where no one is on the streets after 5 o’clock, and where the downtown stores display perpetual closing-sale signs.

The town’s name is Durance, which means imprisonment, of course; but which also suggests the long endurance of Father Gilvary, the Catholic priest in a Bible-belt town; and of Henrietta, the aging, blowzy proprietor of the Three Square Meals, universally known, because of its location, as Henrietta’s Cemetery Restaurant.

Prosaic Martyrdom

Father Gilvary resolutely bears his prosaic martyrdom. He tried being a missionary in India, but his stomach was weak; and so he finds himself visiting a dying Catholic or two in the local hospital, calling upon a few housebound widows, and struggling with the finances of a parish church that will undoubtedly close once he retires. He is a St. Sebastian of the trivial; the arrows are roof-repair bills, parish committee chit-chat, and a breezy, company-man of a Vicar General. The only thing that keeps his church afloat, he reflects with patient irony, are the town’s Baptists. Not allowed to gamble in their own church, they flock to his bingo evenings.

Henrietta is an endurer of another kind. She was “Miss Rattlesnake 1948”; now she is 57, keeps four floppy dolls on her bed to talk to, laments her dead husband, entertains an elderly lover who mostly wants to rest, and waits “for someone or something to walk into her life.” Her morning toilette, with mascara, rouge and false eyelashes, resembles an urban renewal project. “All lit up,” a customer tells himself, watching her preside over her cafe. “Looks like one of those painting by the numbers jobs.”

She seems silly but she isn’t. Her work gives her dignity; the Cemetery Restaurant is run with fierce devotion. Her hopes are few and perhaps pathetic, but she sustains and abandons them with equal dignity. She, like Father Gilvary, is faithful to what she has chosen. Ordinary time, aside from its usual meaning, also refers to that long stretch in the Catholic liturgical calendar when there are no major feasts. It is Henrietta’s and the priest’s time.

Risks of the Ordinary

There are several kinds of risk in setting your subject upon the ordinary, even if your point is the heroism to be found in it. One is that the reader will be bored. To Mojtabai’s priest and cafe-owner, time often seems to stand still; “Ordinary Time” often seems to do so as well, and perhaps all the more because of the clear honesty with which it is written.

A novel of stasis can be redeemed by unforgettable characters. The two endurers in the book are appealing and sometimes moving, but they are rather crowded. We feel sympathy for them, but it would be greater if the author hadn’t placed them so perilously close to other literary models. Father Gilvary is a cross between a J. F. Powers priest and a Bernanos cure ; he lacks the combativeness of the former and the profundity of the latter. Henrietta, for all her doughty appeal and individual touches, is too close to other valiantly raddled literary beauties to seem quite fresh to us. Mojtabai treads the edge of imitation with grace and precarious originality, but she treads too close and sometimes falls in.

There are two modest elements of action in the book. One is the arrival in town of Val, a loner with a blanked-out past. He has lost a job, a woman, a life; but he can’t remember them. There is a pent-up violence in this amnesia, and it works for a while; it gives Val the effect of an explosion waiting to take place. It is hard to sustain latency, however. After 100 pages or so he seems not so much mysterious as null. When the violence does come--it coincides with Val’s beginning to remember his past--it is muted and anticlimactic.

Climax would be against the purpose of the book. Father Gilvary’s growing blindness is more of a dramatic theme than Val’s stranger-in-town turbulence. Time, in a sense, is the action in “Ordinary Time.” It is a haunting concept, and in many ways this is a distinguished book.