The Moments Lost: A Midwest Pilgrim's Progress

Olds's elephantine third novel opens as a bildungsroman based loosely on the real life of one Frank Shavs. Olds calls him Franklyn Shivs, here a more-or-less self-educated Wisconsin farm boy who has his Chicago journalistic breakout covering the Iroquois Theater fire of 1900. Franklyn then enters bohemian society, meets intellectual Floyd Dell and IWW leader Big Bill Haywood and becomes the spurned lover of the brilliant, outrageous Margaret Anderson. Fighting the demons of alcohol and dissipation by the novel's midpoint, Franklyn is dispatched to Michigan's Upper Peninsula to cover the Wobbly-led copper mine strike of 1913. Olds paints it in exquisite, violent detail, but Franklyn's journalistic objectivity is compromised by a love affair with Wobbly activist Ana Clemec, which leads to a tragic (but overbaked) climax. Plot and character development are subordinate to the history of the period, the ambience of the era and the politics of the times, all delivered in an intentionally excessive style ($10 words, baroque sentences) that is, at its best, acrobatically beautiful and remarkably penetrating. A side effect, however, is that when straightforward action or passion are called for, it comes off as artificial and ironic. Recalling Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Dos Passos's The Forty-Second Parallel , this is a compelling but frustrating performance. (Apr.)