August 1960
Mr. Karp, who seems to me one of the best novelists writing today (and whose last novel I picked up just now and was again unable to stop reading) has achieved here a novel with a dream-like, but pungent quality; comedic fantasy masking acute observation and serious comment. It is continuously entertaining and funny; as the same time it is accurate, extremely skilful at sticking quietly to its point and altogether another triumph for Mr. Karp.
Julius Schapiro works for a play producer called Pollack who runs his small concern on his ex-wife’s cash (it never makes any money because no plays are actually produced but, as Mr. Pollack says, it is not a business but a vocation ‘like a church’). Julius’ spare time is spent fruitlessly writing pop songs, and more hopefully with an entrancing young woman called Daphne, whose innocence seems to him so reckless that he asks her about her early life. She tells him: a virgin until she was twelve...sold into slavery in Marrakesh when she was sixteen…rrested eight times, in jail six times ...smoked hashish for the first time at fifteen, took heroin at sixteen….has killed three men and two women, been shot twice stabbed four times and whipped three times - and, she finishes engagingly, is now in love with him. She is lying: but no, she, like her idealistic father, is a Truth Seeker, and they do not lie. But Julius also has a mother, whose simple questions (richly surrounded by a predatory, idolatrous monologue about him, which is her secret life) soon unearth the fact of Daphne, who is not a Jewess, and this inflammation - she stops at nothing - provokes a letter from her addressed to ‘dear J. Edgar Hoover’…
To Evelyn, the secretary in Pollack’s agency, plain, clear-sighted and awake, all these characters - and many more - are sleep-walkers, each of them drifting in their private unreality; smiling out of the little vacuum of their dream worlds - so foolish, so touching, that although she keeps resolving never to wake them, she knows that resolution is meaningless, as life would be intolerable if she did not try.