Books: Truth Is a Snake

A MAN IN THE WHEATFIELD by Robert Laxalt. 178 pages. Harper & Row. $3.95.

Smale Calder kept rattlesnakes. He tamed them, talked with them, let them crawl on his arms and shoulders and dart their tongues in his face. To him they meant the cruel beauty of reality, and his control of them was a conquest of nature at its deadliest. When he first showed up in the sun-drenched nameless village in the Southwestern desert, nobody knew about his peculiar hobby.

The mayor, a paternalistic despot who had created the town and peopled it entirely with fellow immigrants from Italy, knew Smale Calder as an alien-“the American.” The priest, Father Savio Lazzaroni, knew at first sight that Smale Calder was the devil. Then the stories about the rattlesnakes began to spread.

Lust for Death. In a first novel as stripped down and sun-bleached as the desert itself, Robert Laxalt makes the townspeople’s envenomed reactions to the snakes into a fascinating, ambiguous allegory of men’s various ways of confronting fear and the presence of death. When the people learn that Calder collects rattlers, they call on him to remove the snakes that infest their stony fields. After the local barber reports that Calder has been seen playing with his snakes in the pit he has built for them, the farmers begin bringing their families in on Sunday afternoons to watch.

The audience, larger each week, is horrified, transfixed with excitement; many watchers secretly lust to see death. The merchants prosper as the snakes draw trade to the village. The children bring small animals, even their own pets, to sacrifice to the snakes.

Father Savio preaches against this idolatry, yet feels himself spiritually empty and deserted by his God.

Lying in Wait. Then one child, the village’s lonely and slightly crazed orphan, secretly tries to imitate Calder with the snakes; he dies horribly. Appalled, Calder refuses to continue the public writes-and the town erupts in riot. The villagers are enraged not so much at the death of the child as at being deprived of their superstitious sport.

In the course of the riot, Calder is killed by one of his own snakes while trying to protect it.

Allegory is a difficult art and an almost forgotten taste. But Author Laxalt has chiseled out a narrative that is diary, unadorned and original. He falters at a couple of points when he slips into direct explanation. Overall, le succeeds powerfully in creating a novel that leaves in the mind a sense of truth lying in wait, with a dry rustle, coiled to strike.