OUT OF WHIRLWIND by James Ferguson, (Providence, R.I., INTI Books, 243 pp., paperback, $9.95)

 Novels, even good novels, have grown increasingly commercial in the past years. It would be hard to find a major New York publisher willing to take a chance on an inventive first book such as James Ferguson’s “Out of Whirlwind.”

 First, its style is unorthodox. It mixes interior monologue, stream of consciousness narration, and historical fact. Second, its subject, French Resistance fighters during the Second World War, would seem to most publishers anachronistic. And last, but not least, it is a serious work of fiction which, in its own telling, does something to expand the possibilities of the novel.

 Happily, to many, the very points that do not bow to commercial whim are those that serve to make a work interesting to a reader; they are even points that allow it to endure. In this imaginative book Ferguson adroitly blends the stylistic leads provided by two of the 20^th century’s great writers, Malraux and Garcia Marquez.

 Reminiscent of Malraux’s novels “Man’s Hope” and Man’s Fate,” it presents the existential trauma of men at war, their attempts to preserve honor, friendship and everyday truths in a world gone mad. Like Garcia Marquez, Ferguson presents such action in a dreamlike setting where even people’s thoughts are tangible. Told as a tale of remembrance by a Spanish monk, the novel tries to explore the reasons or justification for the death of one of the Resistance fighters. Its title, borrowed from the Book of Job, bespeaks the turbulence of the times it chronicles.

  Were it not so much a tale of humanity at the limit, one could easily call the novel delightful. Its attention to the detail of individuals’ thought and motive is, at times, mesmerizing.

Two moments stand out, one wherein a resistance fighter captures a fascist couple, man and woman, who have been responsible for the deaths of many. He has them dig their own graves and executes them. It is difficult to describe how human a scene this becomes in Ferguson’s hands. The pain and torment of it are there, but the author transcends, as he does continuously throughout the book, these awful moments in the interest of exploring the human dimension of choice. That said, it would be safe to claim that “Out of Whirlwind” is an existential novel, easily as powerful and demanding in theme as any by Malraux, Sartre, or Nizan.

  But there are moments of choice too that embrace life, and present a world within a world at war, a world delicate and lovely. One of the most powerful scenes in the book shows an older and a younger man trying to save the life of a girl about to drown. Their rescue of her, their attempts to pump breathing life back into her lungs and, at last, her acceptance of that life, serve to make a moment of literature, the kind that grips the reader and transports him or her in a way that no commercial novel ever could.

 This is a novel which, with its dense time structure, takes the reader from moment of epiphany to moment of epiphany. We continually see people on the edge of life brought home to the full realization of humanity. One honestly wonders how Ferguson, a young man who is a professor of English and a Yale graduate, could ever have experienced the insight that would lead to such a powerful piece of writing. Perhaps it defies explanation.

 This book, published by INTI Books, publisher of collections by Latin American writers such as Garcia Marquez, Cortazar, and Puig, is the first English language publication they have ever undertaken. It is also their first publication of a novel. It is an auspicious beginning.

Don Faulkner
written in 1983