Books: Goodfellow's Progress

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DUGGAN (167 pp.)—Richard Dougherty—Doubleday ($3.50).

The goodfellow is large, well informed, modest and moneyed; he has decent impulses and the ability to keep such impulses decently in check. To the goodfellow, self-respect is a garden path, not the tightwire it is to most men. Thus securely footed, the goodfellow can perform extraordinary acts of treachery while maintaining an excellent opinion of himself. Others almost invariably share this opinion.

In this nasty, low, mean and excellent novel, the goodfellow under scrutiny is Crandall Avery. best friend to Robert Duggan, the novel's narrator. With warm misanthropy Duggan relates their joint history: how they grazed through college together, acquired town houses that matched and wives who did not, how together they entered the hurly-burly of New York reform politics. They run for Congress—Duggan as campaign manager and Avery, of course, as candidate. As Duggan churns out press releases from a mimeograph machine in a rented hotel ballroom, .his beautiful wife is entering a suite in the same hotel to cheer Avery, who has twisted his neck severely by throwing back his head in a Rooseveltian campaign laugh. Duggan bitterly re-creates the scene: the pink, passive hero, the innocent back rub, the tide of passion.

Duggan takes his revenge by seducing Avery's wife, and the two friends end by exchanging wives. The victory would seem to be Duggan's. Goodfellow Avery fails at politics despite open-faced dishonesty, and in the round of divorces and remarriages, Avery is clearly the loser. It is not long before he dies a ludicrous death (drunkenly, he dives into 2 ft. of water, thinking it is deep, trying to rescue a child's doll, thinking that it is a child).

But Author Dougherty values irony above all other literary minerals, and the vein runs deep. Several years later, Duggan muses on the rewards of goodfellowship: how even Avery's first wife—Duggan's present one—never abandoned her warm regard for the failed politician and faithless husband. The depth of that regard is vividly apparent to Duggan as he watches his sturdy young son, born after the second round of marriages but, he realizes uncomfortably, well before Avery drowned. "He is generous with his toys, and waits his turn at the slides even when he is being cheated by his mates. He has a sunny, loving nature. He is," Duggan reflects, "in every respect a goodfellow."