NONFICTION - April 10, 1994

OLD SONGS IN A NEW CAFE by Robert James Waller. (Warner: $16.95; 172 pp.) I would rather have had Robert Waller give my college graduation speech (he could use the one printed in this collection under the name “Romance,” given at University of Northern Iowa where he is dean of the School of Business) than the speaker we had--Felix Rohatyn. Waller’s not a bad writer; from these scraps of a memoir, he’s a likable person, and he seems to want to be a regular guy, evidenced among other things by his use of the word cripes (the first time I have ever seen that word in print). But he is not the real thing. He is too self conscious (“In Big Sur, I read my poetry by firelight.” Yuck!); he believes that “too much analysis of certain things removes the romance from them,” a belief which never allows the holder to become an interesting person or a great writer; his characters, since they are only extensions of himself, do not stand on their own or have any bite at all; his sentiment is shallow (when a cat he loves dies, his wife says, “He was a good guy,” and Waller writes, “I nodded and thought she had said it perfectly”); and his sentences, while they have some music in them, are not distinctive or particularly original. He’s a Coke commercial, a passing fancy, a good cry. But none of this will stop you.