New Axis

by Charles Newman

His first book. A series of short stories that describe various episodes in the lives of Little Ed D's suburban Chicago family. Autobiographical in tone, the novel spans a generation and includes some good descriptive passages of Chicago and area scenery.

Genres: Literature

128 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Charles Hamilton Newman was an American writer, editor and dog breeder. Newman’s best-known work is The Post-Modern Aura, a scathing critique of contemporary culture that, unusually for a work of criticism, was reviewed and discussed in over thirty magazines, including general interest publications such as Time.

Reviews

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

[And a little under two weeks later…]

Yep. Still fucking great. Imagine The Graduate. Now imagine it good.

Pretty much.


HOUSEKEEPING 2025:

Oh, Charles Newman. When will you get the critical reassessment so long overdue you? Where is your fellating NYRB reintroduction to the popular reading world?

I adore this novel and, goddam it, I'm going to go snatch it from a shelf for a rereading as soon as I finish what I am reading now! I said what I said! Hell with what I had planned (take THAT, Fate)! 8 calendar years is plenty enough time on heat to have hardened beyond even remotely ovate (much less edible) thanks to my blackguard of a memory.

Hey, this Housekeeping shit may pay off yet!

[🐴 🍖]

if you can imagine it this kinda splits the difference b/w salinger and slow learner-era t-pynch: mid-century american families bein' families in a perfectly faceless suburb built on a former horseradish farm, replete w/ frozen pizza & chlorinated swimming pools & televised sporting events. parts were baggier than strictly necessary & others had an odd hermetic quality to them, but the good stuff is startlingly good. "the scales of justice" in particular is just effing exquisite -- an incredible kid's-p.o.v. rendering of that not-quite-"guilt"-as-we-understand-it-bc-your-frontal-lobe-is-still-squishy feeling you have as a child when you know you've done something wrong, coupled w/ an ending that starts off-kilter and gets surrealer the more you reflect on it. if sixties suburban america were another country this would be one of those books they'd tell you to read before visiting, to get a sense of the culture

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

King’s Kove, New Axis is a new, 1950s American suburb and the ten interconnected stories of Little Ed and his family that make up Charles Newman’s first novel (published in 1966) revolve around the everyday events of neighbourhood and home.

Newman was brought up in just such a suburb, somewhere north of Chicago, and clearly the world of New Axis is one that the author knew well. The book’s cover suggests surreality and a hint of satire, but from a British perspective these are hard to detect. In austere postwar Britain, the new American suburbs - glimpsed occasionally in Hollywood films and magazine features - were a Walt Disney fantasy. Like vast, rocket-finned American cars, they belonged to some unobtainable future and not to the real world. So to a reader like me New Axis is innately surreal, whether Newman intended it or not. Self-satirical too. It’s comparatively lightweight and perhaps somewhat dated, but Newman writes well – surprisingly so for a first novel – and it’s short enough to be enjoyable, if only as a peek into this alien world.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actually from 1966 not '68 as stated above. It isa set of short stories revolving around a family and their neighbours in an early suburb, the D's: Big Ed a real estate developer, his bored wife Nora, and their son Little Ed. We are presented with non-chronological snapshots through their life. It is rather terrible early sixties, Updike-like stuff. You can see why it has been forgotten because it just isn't that great. There is not yet the ecstatic use of language (maybe something like Richard Farina? I can't quite put my finger on it) that is present in his next work The Promisekeeper or 84's White Jazz.
One story focusses on a highschool headmaster with aspirations to be a writer and describes his process, which upon reading the introduction to the recently published posthumous work In Partial Disgrace, seems to depict how Newman worked: writing brief snippets down on scraps of paper as they came to him that he would later assemble into something larger.

[Leonard McCullen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a conscious hinge between modernism and post-modernism. It is a book about familial and filial fatherhood and how each generation interprets their inherited culture differently from their predecessors. It’s about suburbanites as the new colonial settlers, building their isolated outposts atop foundations of wasted potential. Their homes functioning as mausoleums for the living dead who are still propelled as a matter of routine.
Heavy with signs and symbols, the small suburb spiritually represents America as a whole. While most of the symbolism went over my head. I could only perceive that the chapter “The Greco-Jewish War” uses the familial patriarch as a symbol for the holy God (the aforementioned Greek vs Jewish war representing here the New- and Old-testament respectively) and his relationship with American culture, wherein Big Ed the pioneer of the suburb rules, in the beginning, through old earthy American wisdom, but as his child and town grow older and wiser, Big Ed’s power wanes and he begins to get into Greek and Jewish history. His mind battles over which is the better: Jewish Law or Greek Chaos. He softens and becomes a more forgiving new-testament father. His sway over the community falters and sinks as the technological age reaches the town in the form of a satellite flying overhead (the space exploration age of the sixties, when science began to chip away at throne of Americas Christian belief system) And while everyone ignores Ed in favor of the metallic object ripping through space, he throws himself into a pond. Once a patriarch but now an embarrassed and emasculated man sitting up to his waist in a pond (for we no longer believe him when he says he can walk on water).

All of this interpretation is based off of 30 pages in the middle of the book out of a total 175. The book is hard to quantify easily. I highly recommend you find yourself a copy.