The Crimson Bookshelf

"Asphalt and Desire" has all the elements of an excellent novel of frustration and bewilderment. The heroine, Iris Leavis, an off-spring of the Bronx Levins and a newly-hatched graduate of Hunter College, is certainly complicated enough for a modern heroine. And her situation abounds in conventional and unconventional value-systems which she can reject with a minimum of hesitation and a maximum of insecurity.

But the book is weakened by two excessive demands Mr. Morton makes on the reader's credulity. One is that we believe Iris really did all the things she says she did during the five days which the novel corers. In that time, she is almost seduced at Saratoga, plans to be seduced in a dingy New York hotel, and is finally deflowered at a New Jersey resort camp. She also manages to graduate, go job-hunting, visit a German theatre and an employment agency for destitute German-Americans, have several vigorous spats with her family, and plan a series of articles on hotel prostitution. There is just too much material; intead of building the impression of a continuing development of experience and understanding, it intrudes a confused stream of sights, sounds, smells, and feelings.

The other demand is that we accept the first-person narrative as being the heroine's actual stream of consciousness. Mr. Morton has a naturally florid style, and his exploitation of the descriptive powers of the English language leads him into a gaudiness of analogy and description which is especially ill-adapted to hectic first-person narration. ("It was a terrifying thing, a pale apple-green cloud, like a carbuncle in the anthracite sky.")

It is a doubly great pity that Mr. Morton chose the "I" technique, since his forte is description of other people. When he steps out of Iris for a moment to watch the goings-on in her West Bronx apartment, he introduces a menagerie of characters who are far more interesting and believable than his heroine. The straight description of her amazing Cornell sophomore brother is much more effective, for instance, than Iris' impressions of one of here amours: "And he still looked at me with all his immense naive vibrating thereness, and all my insides goose-pimpled as at something strange, impossible, dangerous . . ."

As in his last novel, "The Darkness Below," Mr. Morton has dealt with an important and fertile topic, this time with the insecurity accompanying loss or rejection of values or allegiances. But, as in the earlier work, he has drawn attention away from the first-person, with whom he is presumably concerned, by his superior handling of objective narrative. Nevertheless "Asphalt and Desire" remains a stimulating commentary on the tribulations of a girls whose ambitions, nurtured by college life, outrun the realities of her social position.