The Steps of Brooklyn

WASTELAND -- Jo Sinclair -- Harper ($2.50).

"Take it slowly, easily," said the blue-grey-eyed psychiatrist (who, as this book's laconic hero, has helped to win its author the $10,000 Harper Prize Novel Contest). "Listen, don't you want me on the couch?" muttered John Brown, who had come to his session of psychoanalysis feeling as supine in body as in mind.

"Sit in the chair," insisted the psychiatrist, who guessed that it would do John a world of good to sit bolt upright for a change. "Here in this room," he told John, "nothing is shameful. Even if you've believed it is all your life. When you talk about it, John, when you get it out into the open, you'll discover it's not shame." He unscrewed the top of his fountain pen, poised it expectantly over a writing pad. Then John knew that there was no escape, and he began to talk.

He was, he said, a photographer on the staff of a Manhattan newspaper. His original name was Jake Braunowitz, but he called himself John Brown so that his colleagues would not know that he was Jewish. He still lived with his family in Brooklyn, but he never allowed any of them to come near his office Once, when he was with friends in the restaurant where his sister," Rosannah, worked, John pretended not to recognize her.

John told the psychiatrist all about "the wasteland" in which he and his family lived. Old Man Braunowitz, a Russian immigrant, was a grimy, scholarly, embittered man, who had nagged his simple wife into animal dullness and shirked his responsibilities as a father. Strong-willed daughter Deborah had backed up her mother and made herself the "father" of the family--and a Lesbian to boot. Daughter Rosannah had dutifully earned her living by serving in bars--which, to John's tortured, hypersensitive imagination, meant that she dallied with the barflies. Daughter Sarah had fled into the arms of a man she did not love, and her children's doleful life exactly reflected her own despair. When the whole miserable family sat around the table at Passover arid Father Braunowitz chanted: "And we cried unto the Eternal, the God of our fathers, and the Eternal heard our voice, saw our affliction, our sorrow, and our oppression," John ground his teeth with rage, and told himself that it was all a lie--"Jews were a lie."

Fadeaway Father. At first, the psychiatrist seemed to John to be just a pleasantly "anonymous" object. Later, he seemed like the real father John had always wanted. At last, he just seemed to fade away--and so did John Brown, the spineless misfit who drank too much, walked with a cringing stoop and wanted the girl he loved to be his mother rather than his wife. Into John Brown's shoes stepped self-confident Jake Braunowitz, who no longer hated his family, because he understood their desperate struggle, who no longer hated the world, because he believed that he had something to contribute to it.

Wasteland is a first novel, by a 32-year-old woman writer who was born in Brooklyn. It has thrilled Novelist Richard Wright (Native Son) more than anything he has read since James Joyce's stories about Dublin's dingy lower middle classes Many may feel that Author Sinclair's strength is not Joycean imaginative power, but brisk, down-to-earth reporting. Unlike most contemporary prizewinners, Wasteland tries to reflect a state of mind that is relevant and timely. Such poetry as it has derives not from the Roman Catholic confessional of Joyce's stories, but from the clinical efficiency of the psychoanalytic confession.

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