BOOK REVIEW : A Fundamental Paradox With Wit

Lives of the Saints by David Slavitt. (Atheneum: $19.95; 174 pages).

When it comes to the meaning of life, the only answer to “What is the answer?” is “What is the question?” Voltaire said it, or maybe it was Gertrude Stein, and it is the conclusion, in a way, to David Slavitt’s seriocomic philosophic novel about human suffering.

The first riddle for the reader, though, concerns the seriocomedy more than the philosophy. Why does the narrator, a hack writer for a scandal magazine that much resembles the National Enquirer, regularly and alternately cite the 17th-Century French writer Nicolas de Malebranche, and a whole catalogue of Roman Catholic saints, ranging from the relatively well-known St. Jude (patron of hopeless causes) to the Blessed Ledwyna (patron of ice skating)?

Fundamentally, we learn, it was because his wife and daughter were killed in their car when struck by a drunken driver. Why then? he asks. And equally, why did they pass that particular spot just at that time? And equally, why was the drunk right there right then?

From the day the first caveman was trampled by a panicky mammoth, it has been the fundamental human cry: Why suffering? And more particularly: Why random suffering? We struggle against the random, we seek an answer.

You can’t get a comic novel or even a seriocomic novel out of a man asking why he has lost his wife and child. So Slavitt places that in the background. In the foreground, his narrator is at work on a series of schlock articles about the six victims of a South Florida mass murderer.

The killer, a bad-tempered recluse who objected continually to neighborhood children cutting across his lawn, takes a gun one day to the parking lot of the local Piggly-Wiggly supermarket, and kills six shoppers. They include a housewife, an Iranian student, a baby in her mother’s arms, a professor who was about to take early retirement to write poetry, a travel agent and a Nicaraguan drug-dealer.

In the shadow of his pain, the narrator engages in a bumbling search for his stories. It is a silly search, and often very funny. His job has him looking not for big answers but for spice and trumped-up pathos. He seizes upon the housewife’s affair with her boss--they are both accountants--and her husband’s affair with the rich socialite he works for as a handyman.

He also seizes, for poignancy, upon her green toothbrush. And upon the jar of freshly sharpened pencils on the professor’s desk: So many poems that will never be written. The magazine reader can alternate a smirk with a sigh. The editor is delighted.

Even as he drags around on his interviews (he is not so much cynical as punch drunk), and deals with the cuckoo internecine warfare at his magazine (he gets fired), the narrator engages in his wounded questioning of the universe.

Hence, Malebranche. The French writer, conducting a rear-guard action against the advent of rationalism and the Scientific Age, denies the cause and effect that the narrator so feverishly is seeking. God is in each effect; it is all a mystery. The apple bops Newton not because of any law, but because God decides to have it fall. Some day, He might decide differently.

Which, as our narrator nicely points out, brings us to modern quantum physics. We know that half of some enormous number of uranium atoms will decay in a given time. There is no way of knowing when, or why, any individual atom will do so. The narrator asks a Woody Allen-like question:

“How does any given atom know when to deteriorate? . . . How does any particular atom know what the other atoms are doing or have done? . . . How do they coordinate? . . . Malebranche would say that each atom has its own destiny.”

He goes on to the random selection of the mass killer’s victims. “Had she been one of those atoms of uranium, her time to decompose was at hand,” he says of the housewife.

It is an answer, but not one he can live with. He keeps on investigating the lives of the victims. He interviews the mass killer and the drunken driver, and gets meaningless answers. Caught in his own pendulum swings, he reverts obsessively to Malebranche; and, for ornament, puts in little passages about the saints, whose miracles are a Malebranchian demonstration of divine intervention over natural law.

It ends, perhaps predictably, with a breakdown from which he is rescued by the widow of the professor. He moves in with her; he takes over the jar of newly sharpened pencils. The relentless search for an answer will cease; after a rest, he will invent some different questions.

Slavitt is an original and ingenious writer. “Lives of the Saints” juggles with a lovely selection of paradoxes and speculations and with the silliness, comedy and grief that lie in its characters’ lives.

The ingredients, unfortunately, are better than their preparation. The Malebranche allusions become monotonous; the saints’ lives, repetitively ornamental. Essentially, there is no advance in the fundamental paradox we get right at the start. It is not Slavitt’s fault. In two millennia, no one else has been able to advance it much either. But it tends to make his book a play of wit in a room that can’t be aired.