Making Do

''Making Do'' is a 1963 ''roman à clef'' novel written by Paul Goodman and published by Macmillan.

Synopsis

Most of the story is set in Vanderzee, New Jersey, a fictionalized Hoboken, where the main characters live after being priced out of and disenchanted with New York City. The novel vascillates between first- and third-person narration. The unnamed narrator meets a college student, Terry, at an Ohio State University panel discussion and falls in love. Their relationship is sexual but they're rarely presented together and some details are presented indirectly, such Terry's drug-induced schizophrenia. Another character, Harold, is impotent and longs for one woman but spends time with teenage Puerto Rican hustlers in New York's Union Square who spend his money. One is tricked into betraying Harold.

The novel is self-referential, as Terry is narrated to have learned about "community" from "Goodman, the anarchist writer, whom he had newly added to the pantheon alongside Nathanael West and Mailer" and another character criticizes Goodman.

The "Banning the Cars from New York" chapter begins with a spontaneous youth handball game played on the wall of a store. When its owner calls the police to end the game, the boy chastizes the narrator for not intervening, for "betraying natural society". The narrator emotionally navigates the conversation and later that evening speaks on a metropolitan radio broadcast about social issues and transportation, proposing how private automobiles could be banned and the streets could be reclaimed for leisure.

Publication

The Macmillan Company first printed ''Making Do'' in November 1963. A paperback edition followed in October 1964 with New American Library's Signet imprint. The book incorporated previous works by Goodman, such as his 1961 proposal for banning cars from Manhattan and two short stories: "Eagle's Bridge: The Death of a Dog" (1962) and "At the Lawyer's" (1963).

Goodman referred to ''Making Do'', along with ''Parents' Day'' and ''The Break-Up of Our Camp'' as his three "community novels". The work is a ''roman à clef'': autobiographical fiction with its central character as a middle-aged social critic, i.e., Goodman.

Goodman's novels and poetry often featured gay subject matter.

Analysis and legacy

Theodore Roszak wrote that the "Banning the Cars from New York" chapter encapsulated Goodman's ethos in building from spontaneous human joy into addressing a structural civic issue. It begins with Goodman's emphasis on unperturbed animal impulse, such as child's play or the narrator's physical love for the boy, and extrapolates into a larger societal concern and analysis.

Goodman's fictional works received little critical recognition, according to a bibliographer of his works.

''The New York Times'' described ''Making Do'' as "a poor novel and a very interesting book" and that despite the narrator's similarity with the author, the narrator becomes a "bore".

References

Bibliography

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External links

Full text (public domain)
from HathiTrust
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{{Portal bar, Books, Literature

1963 American novels
Books by Paul Goodman
English-language novels
Macmillan Publishers books
1960s LGBTQ novels
Roman à clef novels
American autobiographical novels