Making Do

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

Making Do

First edition
Author	Paul Goodman
Published	November 1963
Publisher	Macmillan
Pages	276
OCLC	284498
LC Class	PS3513 O53 M3

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.^[1]

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.^[1]

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".^[2] 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.^[3]

Publication

The author, c. 1964

The Macmillan Company first printed Making Do in November 1963. A paperback edition followed in October 1964 with New American Library's Signet imprint.^[4] The book incorporated previous works by Goodman, such as his 1961 proposal for banning cars from Manhattan^[5] and two short stories: "Eagle's Bridge: The Death of a Dog" (1962)^[6] and "At the Lawyer's" (1963).^[7]

Goodman referred to Making Do, along with Parents' Day and The Break-Up of Our Camp as his three "community novels".^[8] The work is a roman à clef:^[9] autobiographical fiction with its central character as a middle-aged social critic, i.e., Goodman.^[10]

Goodman's novels and poetry often featured gay subject matter.^[1]

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.^[10]

Goodman's fictional works received little critical recognition, according to a bibliographer of his works.^[8]

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".^[11]