Books: No Myth

THE IRON HOOP (268 pp.)—Cons/crn-tine FitzGibbon—Knopf ($3).

Last year, with The Arabian Bird, Author FitzGibbon showed the critics that he could write a pretty good first novel. This time he has attempted the poet’s task of turning history into myth, without the poet’s vision. Though the result is bad myth, it is not a complete failure as a novel.

The Iron Hoop presents itself as the story of any occupation after any war. The conquered are represented by “The Hero,” an aging visionary; Bud, a sex-happy racketeer; Paul, a boy trying to do the man’s work of revolution, and his sister Anna, the eternal fraulein. The conquerors include a commanding general whose rifle-cracking speech sounds borrowed from George Patton; the general’s rare-do-well nephew, who keeps his wife in a nervous sweat and Anna in a little apartment, and a Congressman who bellows in public to inspect the security files, and pants in private to visit a brothel.

The story moves swiftly to a climax in which Hero & friends fail, like Boy Scouts trying to crank a tank, to bring about the first sputter of a revolution. At its best, The Iron Hoop reads like a somber farce. Otherwise it has the curious distinction of being readable and interesting without evoking the slightest sympathy for any of its characters.