Books: T.T.’s Daughter

TALE OF A WHISTLING SHRIMP (251 pp.) —Vladimir B. Grinioff—Dutton ($3.50).

With the exception of John P. Marquand and a handful of others, novelists are prone to regard bankers as villains or vegetables. Even when the banker is a Communist, the curse is not lifted. Present case in point: the vice president of a bank in an industrial city in South Russia, Taras Tarasovich Popugaev, “a bread-salter” (i.e., great party-giver), known to friends in true tycoon style as T.T. Thus Vladimir B. Grinioff, 45, a Russian-born U.S. expert on Russian affairs, presents one of the most grotesque and ingratiating figures of this year’s fiction.

MVD in Vogue. T.T., a sort of Bolshevik Babbitt with a strain of a Good Soldier Schweik of the Class War, is the central figure in a series of events which would seem like fantasy were not each episode matched by a solemn quotation from Soviet pronouncements. By Soviet standards, T.T. is highly fortunate—he has a television set, a Pobeda automobile, a plump stomach and a talented teen-age daughter named Simochka. Yet there comes the dreadful day when it is reported from Simochka’s university that she has been overheard making anti-party statements. This is serious business—only last year, two students had to be shot for forming a secret society. At this moment Novelist Grinioff’s comictheme bursts into full cauliflower as his outraged Communist echoes the cry of many a rich bourgeois with a difficult child: “Where did she learn such words? She had a governess!”

Rapidly it becomes clear that T.T.’s bank, like the Musical Bank in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, deals not only in money but in moral imponderables. For the Soviet banker, unbalanced books are a small matter, but the failure to balance the books of the sacred Marx-Lenin-Stalin writings may prove fatal. The action dissolves in a mirage of Marxist motivation: whom to bribe with what is the problem. Thus, to buy silence, the television set goes to a despised subordinate, a piano to someone else, a raccoon coat to a third. Simochka is saved, at the price of most of Daddy’s worldly goods—only to be trapped again by a girl MVD agent who wins the simple Communist debutante’s confidence with a copy of a magazine resembling Vogue.

Barchester in Russia. Then comes the switch. Stalin is posthumously purged by Khrushchev & Co., and the spiral of official truth spins into reverse. Simochka, it appears, was right all along. T.T. is back in the center of his absurd universe, and the bribes fly back from the terrified recipients. Thus Novelist Grinioff extracts ribald comedy from his central theme: under tyrannous government, humanity exists in the corruption of its officials. It is human crookedness that can best the inhuman game.

The book is oddly reminiscent of BarChester Towers. Instead of Trollope’s worldly clergy with fat cathedral livings. there are the Communist hierarchs of the “New Class.” Instead of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, the cruel nonsense of dialectical truth provides the rules of the contest for place and power. Author Grinioff works the same novelist’s magic as Trollope—the reader finds Communism hateful and absurd but still wants the little Red bank manager to beat the rap. The book’s ultimate irony is stated in the title taken from a 1955 speech by Khrushchev: ”We will abandon Communism when the shrimp learns to whistle.” According to scientists shrimps are actually highly vocal (one, the Pistol Prawn, makes a noise like a cap pistol). Says one Grinioff character slyly at the novel’s final party: “They whistle all the time—but only for each other.”