He Said, She Said: Dialogue’s the Thing in Post-’Graduate’ Work

NEW CARDIFF

A Novel

By Charles Webb

Washington Square Press

354 pages, $14, paper

*

When you think of “The Graduate,” you most likely remember Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft’s boffo performances as bemused young hero and sultry aging seductress in Mike Nichols’ stylish 1967 movie. But before the movie there was Charles Webb’s first novel of the same name, on which the film was based. Especially notable for the fact that it contained an exceptionally high proportion of dialogue, “The Graduate” attracted little attention on its publication in 1963. But it was inevitable that from the time the movie appeared, Webb’s subsequent fiction would forever be adorned--and burdened--by the link with that defining cultural icon of the 1960s.

Webb went on to write half a dozen more novels into the 1970s, then stopped. After a 25-year hiatus, he has returned to fiction with another bemused, if not quite so young, hero. Colin Ware, the protagonist of “New Cardiff,” is a mild-mannered Englishman who gets to look at love from both sides of the Atlantic. Reeling from the shock of being coldly dumped by his longtime girlfriend, Vera, Colin flees England, the scene of his heartbreak and humiliation, for what he hopes will be a restorative sojourn in America.

For no particular reason, he lands in New Cardiff, a picturesque New England town framed by the brilliant colors of fall foliage. Something about the place appeals to Colin, and he settles in at a motel run by an obliging couple named the Fishers. Mr. Fisher gamely agrees to sit for a portrait. (Colin is an artist who likes drawing faces that strike him as interesting.) Mrs. Fisher arranges for Colin to receive the therapeutic attentions of her friend Mandy, a professional caregiver who works at a local old-age home.

Mandy’s winsome ways strike a responsive chord in Colin: “Two people who are naked together don’t have to have sex ... any more than two people with their clothes on are necessarily not going to have it,” she explains, after suggesting to Colin that they both get undressed. “Naked people may have it more,” he replies. “I don’t know if there have been studies.”

Before long, Colin and Mandy have become an item. Impulsive, unsophisticated, affectionate and kindhearted, Mandy is pretty much the opposite of Vera in every way. She even has a knack for helping Colin find interesting people to sit for him. Everything is going swimmingly when Vera shows up. As Colin has explained to Mandy, he and Vera go way back: Before they were lovers, they were childhood friends, and before that, as Vera guilefully informs the guileless Mandy, their mothers met while pregnant with them. Vera regrets the rash act that drove Colin away, and she’s determined to get him back.

Webb once again tells his story largely through dialogue, displaying his considerable flair for comedy, not to mention his sharp ear for the voices of his characters and the cadences of contemporary conversation. The scenes in which Colin tells his romantic troubles to the Fishers are particularly funny. (Mr. Fisher, after giving the matter due consideration, suggests to Colin that the most likely reason Vera broke off their relationship so suddenly is that some cult must have gotten hold of her.) Webb, who like Colin has lived on both sides of the Atlantic, has a great deal of fun gently and affectionately satirizing both sets of national characteristics. Webb’s artist wife, Fred, contributes an additional amusing touch with illustrations that are supposed to be Colin’s sketches of the various people he’s met in the course of the story.

The novel’s considerable charms, however, may not be enough to allay the suspicions of at least some readers who may wonder if Colin’s attachment to Mandy is not based on the same kind of romantic idealization that had rendered him blind to Vera’s flaws for so many years. Mandy, to be sure, is very different from Vera: as innocent as Vera is designing, as modest as Vera is pretentious, as kind as Vera is spiteful. But she also has a stubborn streak and sounds a bit childish at times. (“You seem ... like someone who wouldn’t get mad at me,” she tells Colin at one point.) Will Colin notice poor Mandy’s flaws and flee farther west (perhaps Australia?), to meet another woman who at first glance looks better than his last woman? Or will Mandy become disillusioned if Colin ever does “get mad” at her?

But for those not inclined to cavil at such minor blemishes, “New Cardiff” is a good-natured, consistently amusing romp through the vicissitudes of no-longer-so-young love.