Monday, Jan. 29, 1973
Two for One
By R.Z. Sheppard
LEO AND THEODORE by DONALD NEWLOVE 341 pages. Saturday Review Press.
$7.95.
For all its lilting wordplay, the vitality of its episodes, the accessibility of its meaning, sentiments and broad comedy, Donald Newlove's second novel can be quite demanding. After finishing the last page, the reader may feel bound to answer a difficult question: Would he pick up hitchhiking 30-year-old Siamese twins, drenched and not too sober, carrying a trumpet, a trombone, a suitcase, a bag containing laundry and a bust of Ludwig van Beethoven?
Do not laugh-or at least do not laugh in the wrong places. For there is much in Leo and Theodore that can get the sludge moving down at the "heart-works" (Mr. Newlove's word). There is the thematic opening passage, an evocation of ideal father-and-son solidarity expressed in a brief description of a family sturgeon hunt on Lake Erie. And some 25 years later there is that final highway scene in which the Siamese twins, Leo and Teddy, hoist dripping thumbs in the hope that some sympathetic motorist will help them move bodies and soul out of that upper New York State region where they have overstayed their childhoods.
Born on the day the stock market crashed in 1929, Leo and Teddy are joined forever at the hip by a tough, flexible band of flesh. Their father Durwood is an odd-job country dreamer; their mother Stella is a former hat-check girl. The twins hop about town with the nimbleness of a randy goat. The local moviehouse and pub are their real academies; indeed a case can be made that much of the novel is a celebration of the drinking life.
Freaks, failures but preposterously optimistic, Leo and Teddy grow to manhood trying to be like everyone else. If their early years suggest the Katzenjammer Kids, their later years are X-rated Laurel and Hardy. They booze, dream of becoming professional jazz musicians, chase and frequently catch girls. There are Leo days, Teddy days, and occasionally Leo-and-Teddy days, never thought it would be like this; I mean, siamese twins, holy Christmas," says one young virgin.
Newlove, author of a highly appreciated first novel, The Painter Gabriel (echoes of Joyce Gary's The Horse's Mouth in New York's East Village), uses a light, syncopated style to move his twins quickly through the years and a series of jobs: countermen, attendants to a decaying old industrialist, driver of a brakeless ambulance. It must be inferred that Leo is the one on the left, since he does the driving.
But it is Teddy who gets the saddest and truest line. "We spend all our time trying to keep cheerful," he confesses during a break in the antics. Holding their freakish reality at bay is, nevertheless, a full-time job that draws heavily on the twins' seemingly endless store of hope. Perhaps its source may be found somewhere in that laundry bag, humming in D minor, under the bust of Beethoven. "R.Z. Sheppard
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