Books: No Soap

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MILKBOTTLE H by Gil Orlovitz. 534 pages. Dell. $7.50.

Gil Orlovitz's first novel may well boast the longest bath scene in literary history. As early as page 8, Lee Emanuel starts undressing. But he proves far less interested in drawing water than in pouring streams of consciousness from the taps of James Joyce. It is not until page 122 that he actually enters the tub. By page 517, he has come to a decision: from now on, the shower for him. By then, it's too late. Orlovitz's waterlogged novel has gone down the drain—a victim of its own sluice-of-life.

What keeps a man and his soap apart for so long? Bad but heavily significant puns. Long scatological accounts of constipation that add up to a plain case of logorrhea. Recurring signs and symbols planted like a Freudian scavenger hunt. Above all, the metaphysical pseudo-Joycean rhetoric of a sometime poet, sometime screenwriter from Hollywood ("The mind is a revolving snowflake out of the backblackward").

The pity is that inside this bad fat novel, a good thin novel is signaling wildly to get out. Behind its mythic pretensions to be a fire-and-water purification ritual, Milkbottle H has the first-rate makings of an old-fashioned Jewish family story. If only he could have dropped his awful obligation to art—his cosmic gropings after sex and death, universal guilt, America! America!—all Author Orlovitz may really have wanted to do was write a nice quiet memoir about a Philadelphia boyhood, made up of such common scrapbook elements as a father hangup, comic aunts, and holiday outings in Atlantic City.

But all the ordinary, honorable components get obstinately blurred, resolutely thrown out of focus by an author who mistakes his vices for his virtues. Almost as if to cover up the honest banality of his basic theme, Orlovitz, 49, has laid on the obscurantism of a great prose experiment. He has succeeded only in substituting conventions of technique for conventions of content.

Milkbottle H, rejected by the major U.S. publishers before appearing in England, is being promoted by Dell as a classic ahead of its time. In fact, the opposite would seem to be true. Orlovitz's "experimental" novel, like most, could have been conceived whole the day after Ulysses was published in 1922. The conclusion is unavoidable: nothing, including Jewish family memoirs, seems quite so old-fashioned these days as a really determined avant-garde novel.