Roots not reasons

THERE is a moment at the end of 9[1/2] Weeks when Mickey Rourke tries

to tell Kim Basinger about his childhood as a way of accounting for his

compulsive, obsessional behaviour. She cuts him off and walks out.

Ralph Glasser's first novel touches on the same subliminal connections

between personal history and attitudes to love and sex. Glasser, author

of the autobiographical Gorbals Trilogy, has always been concerned with

the way in which our formative years, and the identities we inherit,

mark us for life. There is no escaping the past, only a painful process

of compromise and accommodation. Our backgrounds don't excuse our

actions, but nor can they be discounted. Roots are not reasons.

Environment shapes rather than determines.

Glasser's work has long occupied a special place for me, since I too

am something of a ''lad o' pairts''. Where Glasser went from the Gorbals

to Oxford, I went from Possil to Cambridge. In this fictional debut

Glasser's Jewishness vies with his Glaswegian provenance in a poignant

and passionate story, full of the insight and tenderness one would

expect from a writer of Glasser's background.

After his bar mitzvah, Leo takes his son Gideon to Rome, scene of a

turning-point in his own life. Counselled and questioned by an inner

voice -- the doppelganger -- Leo retraces his footsteps some 15 years

earlier, when, during a near-death experience on a bad flight, he fell

for Chiara, an air hostess. A brief and passionate romance ended when

Leo had to choose between marrying within the tribe and embracing this

woman from another culture and country.

The decisive moment comes when they lie naked together, and she

suddenly notices that he is circumcised: ''You are Jewish!'' This is the

first time he has been identified in this way: ''At last he saw why he

had never been with a Jewish girl. That commitment would have been

intolerable too, for how could he pretend to accept their common

heritage while secretly in flight from it?''

Returning to England, he meets and marries Miriam, middle-class and

''Jewish in a mild, automatic conformity''. Now, in Rome again, he sees

the nature of that compromise: ''He had not solved 'the problem' of

living with his Jewishness, for he had not even understood what the

problem was!'' He realises that his life with Miriam has allowed him to

forget his Jewishness: ''With that milk-and-water handing on of

tradition, he had avoided a reckoning with himself.''

While the relationship with Chiara occupies the bulk of Leo's memory,

there are one or two flashes of his childhood in a ''tiny tenement flat

in the old Gorbals, the windows dark with grime, a sticky flypaper black

with dead flies hanging from the ceiling''. He recalls his father

enticing him to read passages from the Bible by placing a sugar lump at

either end. A different kind of novel, perhaps more predictable, would

have held fast to those earlier memories. Instead, the Gorbals features

only in the most elliptical and negative way.

There is one compelling instance when the tenements of youth impinge

on Leo's hard-won suburban lifestyle. On the day of his engagement to

Miriam, he is angered by her announcement that she intends to make her

own rugs, which he sees as an illustration of her propensity for

''sandals and socialism'', an affront to the real hardship of his

upbringing: ''I spent five years knocking my guts out in a factory, to

say nothing of burning my eyes out in night school before I had God's

own luck and got to Oxford!''

Briefly reunited with Chiara, Leo makes her another false promise to

return: ''whenever I found a woman who spoke to my condition I ran for

my life''. Back in London, in a final compromise, he resolves to stay

with Miriam, but to take a mistress. The restricted roles played by

women in this novel says something about the extent to which the

identities it explores are fundamentally masculine. Perhaps Ms Basinger

was right not to listen. After all, who ever heard of a ''lass o'

pairts''?