The Cave [Paperback]

Here's a book that is becoming more and more rare... a book about complex people with complex motives. Warren's poetic novel is wonderful to read just for the phrasing at times, but the characters, their history, their thoughts and actions, and their interactions are what really brings this to the top of my short list. It's a book for a book group. So many ideas so close to the surface, without being absolutely thrown in your face. Without giving away the end, I can say that you see much of it coming, but you don't care. You want to read every word to see what Warren has to say about the connections and lack of connections between people.

The Cave, like all RPW's novels, is a deep, rich, philosophical narrative, the kind that one doesn't come across very often, but with a slight difference. Here, by quoting Plato's famous "cave analogy" as the epigraph to the book, he tips his hand as to what he's all about here. Briefly, for Plato, most men live their lives as if chained to the walls of a cave only giving heed to the shadows of themselves that flicker on the opposite wall cast by the fire lit behind them. They never turn around to see the light of day which corresponds (in Plato's analogy) to the "true forms" or eidai. For Plato, only the philosopher lives outside the cave and can attempt to lead men out. I'm not so sure about RPW's take on this latter tenet of Plato's regarding the philosopher. But he certainly knows how to deftly, unsettlingly plumb the darkness in the hearts of all men and women, the inevitable disappointments, the emptiness after the consummation of the deed.

Right. To the book itself, the cave deception works on two levels here. The first, obvious, superficial deception involves a young man named Jasper Harrick trapped in a cave and another young man, Isaac Sumpter, who gulls the ever so willing to be gulled populace or demos into great excitement about the event. The mob forms a mob about the cave, or stays glued to their flickering black-and-white TV sets or radios. And Isaac Sumpter makes a handsome profit out of it.

But Isaac Sumpter finds life empty afterwards, still being a man. There are a great number of other characters involved in all of this whose inner lives are richly threshed out by Penn Warren, in all their darkness and inquietude. The cave incident is merely a metaphor - like Plato's, for their own trapped, dark lives. As Mr. Bingham meditates after deciding to divorce his wife:

"Thousands of people, he didn't know how many, had come here because a poor boy had got caught in the ground, and had lain there dying. They had wept, and prayed, and boozed, and sung and fought, and fornicated, and in all ways possible had striven to break through to the heart of mystery which was themselves. No, he thought...to break out of the dark mystery which was themselves."

The only tenuous way out for these people, for the reader, for any man, seems to be the images in our heads which, with some significant changes with which I'm not sure Plato would go along, are not totally unlike his eidai. As Mr. Bingham contemplates further on the future happiness of his daughter:

"He could not understand why the thought of the picture of them - Jo-Lea, Monty and the baby - should be even sweeter than the thought of them as real. The picture, he guessed, was more outside some of the trouble of life."

Indeed. As ever in this world, the yearning is better than the having.

I found this book in a used bookstore and just opened it up and started reading. Something about it got me hooked, and I just keep going. The novel is constructed brilliantly, with Warren providing large backgrounds for all of his charecters in the first 150 or so pages, and then the "experiences" of the different individuals caving in on one another. The end of the novel contains some of the most powerful dialogues scenes I have ever read. I loved this book.

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