Books: Beauty and the Beast

THE MANIAC RESPONSIBLE by Robert Cover. 222 pages. Grove Press. $4.50.

To an age brought up to believe that sexual finesse is almost as important a social grace as, say, good table manners, it sometimes comes as a shock to be reminded that lust is one of the seven deadly sins. Moralists who insist on this fact are likely to be regarded as bores, or boors, or both. One moralist, however, who runs no such risk is a cheerful, youthful novelist named Robert Gover.

In his book, The One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding (TIME, Nov. 9, 1962), Gover locked up a vacuum-packed college sophomore with a pretty Negro prostitute for the weekend, and wound up proving not only that the girl was far nicer than the boy but that Gover is a comic writer of some talent. In his second book, Gover explores what he obviously feels is yet another forbidden daydream of the American male: the rape-murder of a beautiful young woman.

Hatchet in Hand. The hero is a small-town reporter covering the crime. Even as he churns out the stories that forensically call on authorities to catch “the maniac responsible,” the young reporter gradually comes to a guilty recognition of his own inner feelings. His shock at seeing the body was indefinably tinctured with lust. “I saw her lying there on the cold basement floor, nude, on the cold basement floor, lovely, and over the horror of the fact washed the desire for the act, uncontrolled, it swept me under despite me, put the hatchet in my hand so my palm dreamed the hatchet’s smooth wood pressing as the blade pulled its end down and I felt my arm come up . . .”

Gover, of course, is far from being the first writer to lament the prurient curiosity that sex crimes stir in the anonymous public. If his shocking book contained only this one macabre dimension, he might be dismissed as another literary sensationalist trying to deplore his cheesecake and have it too.

Right Sequence. Instead, Gover offers what at first seems to be some blessed burlesque relief. In a comic will-she-or-won’t-she seduction scene, the clever reporter, taking time out from the case, is cossetted, cozened and finally totally defeated by a sumptuous, fluff-headed salesgirl who is canny enough to keep the only two ideas she ever had—marriage and bed—in their proper sequence. Given today’s liberal standards and the girl’s palpably provocative evasions, a reader is likely to find himself lightheartedly rooting for the reporter. The doings and undoings, anyway, all appear to be good clean smoking-room fun. Then, it suddenly becomes apparent that in the hero’s blithe pursuit of what appears to be fair game lurks the seed of the same violence that brought the young widow to death on the cold basement floor. The frustrated reporter finds himself crouched in the dark on a fire escape outside the salesgirl’s window, titillated by notions of breaking and entering.

The twist is as telling as it is chilling. Unhappily, Gover feels called upon to spell out his message in overwrought action. Hauled in by police as a Peeping Tom, the appalled reporter loses control of himself, “confesses” to the murder of the widow because, like others in the town, he has been guilty of its intent. Unhappily, this fine kernel of the book is soon lost in a mishmash of experimental literary prancing that includes not one but two interminable, nightmarish imaginary debates between such characters as Morbid Interest, Newspaper, and several facets of the hero’s personality, each speaking under a different version of his name. Gover should have kept it simple.