Books: The Protagonist as Pudding

THE MAN WHO HAD POWER OVER WOMEN by Gordon M. Williams. 319 pages. Stein and Day. $5.95.

Thanks to a leering title, bales of advance ballyhoo and the promise that it would expose the really “in” people in swinging London, this novel about a public relations man with an identity problem seems headed for bestsellerdom. A first printing of 40,000 copies has been ordered, the Literary Guild has snatched it up, paperback rights have been sold for six figures, and Paramount plans to film it. But nothing swings all that much in the book.

The central figure, a paunchy, 37-year-old promoter of pop singers, is neither big enough to be a hero nor mean enough to be an antihero—it is simply a case of the protagonist as pudding (in this case, Yorkshire). Peter Reaney is as square as Trafalgar. He dangles from familiar hang-ups: a nagging wife whom he calls Her Malevolence, a job about which he feels guilty, and a loathing for the contemporary English way of life. His conversation is modishly cynical: “Take to the boats, lads, and let the women drown.”

What about his power over women? Mostly in his mind. In one of Reaney’s sexual fantasies, he is the only man in the Empire who escapes impotence from a fiendish dust unleashed by the Russians. An all-woman Cabinet appeals to him to fulfill his duties. “My greatest achievement,” he recalls, “was to produce the goods for Britain 113 times in one week.” But when the dreams end, Reaney is strictly a power failure. He attributes one blowout to the fact that the widow in the upstairs flat had bad breath. He talks a young singer out of bed by asking the equivalent of what’s a nice thing like you doing in show biz. He finally finds happiness in a most old-fashioned way: with his best friend’s wife.

Williams’ story does contain some rib-a’d fun. “Come on, desiccated creeps,” Reaney cries out in a with-it drinking club, “throw off your guilt, throw out your chests, you’re English. Form up the squares, Kabul to Kandahar, Mad Mullahs, Pathans, Uhlans, Marshal Ney —stuff the lot of them, bloody foreigners, show them cold English steel.” But his writing is marred by cliches of thought (“That was life, people dominated by people, dominating others in turn”) and some awful puns (“Ezra Pounds while Ernest Humsaway”).

An ex-London journalist, Williams writes as if he knows London. If so, those in search of a really swinging scene might just as well cancel that BOAC flight and book seats instead for Katmandu—or even Kansas City.