Books: Mixed Fiction

FALSE ENTRY, by Hortense Calisher (484 pp.; Little, Brown; $5.75).

Author Calisher, whose elliptical New Yorker stories have brought her a small but fanatical following, has labored for six years on this first novel. Unhappily, she has brought forth a mousse: a gelatinous concoction inflated with whipped-in wind. The theme is “false entry into another person’s life, into his present by means of his past.” Simply, this means one man’s pretense that certain things happened to him that actually happened to someone else. The pertinence of the theme, symbolically or literally, is not made apparent, as the hero successively changes his name, testifies in a trial as an eyewitness to events he never saw, and later, on seduction bent, “enters” a girl’s life by pretending he knew her dead brother. In the telling, everything is hemstitched with the heaviest of literary embroidery. (A telephone booth is “a slim, body-width oratory . . . a temple of self-abuse, saving synagogue of the air.”) Once in a while there are a few glints of true gold. (“What we do not do persists, classic and perfect, beneath what we do. The final admixture is the judgment.”) But the total effect of Author Calisher’s novel is like sipping gallons of weak, mandarin-style tea from a fur-lined cup.

I MET A LADY, by Howard Spring (448 pp.; Harper; $4.95). Author Spring’s 13th novel chronicles the tangled destinies of the Chown family, whose women have a marked tendency to produce bastards. The narrator is George Ledra, the somewhat stuffy scion of a Manchester cotton broker. On vacation in Cornwall, 15-year-old George one felicitous morning hides in the bushes above a beach to watch Sylvia Chown Bascombe and her daughter Janet “wade naked ashore, glistening in the sunshine. They were both beautiful, the one full-breasted, the other budding.” It was, thinks George, “a moment that belonged to the beginning of the world.” For the next 30 years and 400 pages, George lopes after Sylvia and Janet. After dithering a bit, he marries Sylvia, who is ten years his senior, rather than Janet, who is eight years his junior. Long practiced in the craft of writing family pageants. Author Spring keeps the subplots boiling, has a Victorian fondness for quaint characters with Dickensian names and habits: necrophiliac Mr. Tiddy, bluestocking Medea Hopkins, Brookes the perfect butler, Nurse Collum, who once saved her virginity by diving into the Isis at Oxford.

THE FUN HOUSE, by William Brinkley (373 pp.; Random House; $5.95). There was nothing wrong with Author (Don’t Go Near the Water) Brinkley’s idea, which was to lampoon a big picture magazine as the sort of hiccup farm where employees run through a four-minute morning, ease up with a five-martini lunch, and frolic back to the office just in time to line up an overnight date with a girl reporter. It was the author’s qualifications that did him in. Before giving up journalism for “full-time writing” (as the book-jacket blurb rather cattily puts it), Brinkley put in six years as a writer for LIFE. But to satirize any magazine, one should work for no more than ten days as a copy boy, and perhaps leaf through a couple of issues. The author’s novel wears his experience like a potbelly. In repeated passages the reader senses that Brinkley is not really interested in writing about “Vital” magazine; he is memorializing bar-car grudges and enthusiasms, thrashing editorial villains and offering prosy bouquets to office heroes (naturally, these are writers who muster the courage to quit and take honest jobs). But Brinkley has shown originality in his formula, for literary success—he writes the sort of book that Hollywood improves.

THE SPINOZA OF MARKET STREET, by Isaac Bashevis Singer (214 pp.; Farrar, Straus & Cudahy; $3.95). In these tales about Poland’s Jewish ghettos before World War II, Isaac Singer creates a world so fresh, so full of the beat and cries of astonishing life that he can fairly be called one of the few originals now writing. It is a world in which God and the devil are constantly in contention, in which imps, cabalistic mysteries and ancient Talmudic heresies are as much a part of the passing show as a quarrel in the market place. The best of these eleven stories tells how Satan ruins the nicest girl in town. Satan contrives that Lise should marry a brilliant, homely scholar who is a secret disciple of Sabbatai Zevi, the False Messiah who taught that the world must become wholly corrupt before it could be made pure. Lise is corrupted by her husband’s obscene sexual instruction. When he finally urges her to sleep with her father’s coachman, she agrees. Jealous and remorseful, the husband rushes to the synagogue and tells all. After a nightmarish trial, the bedeviled wife, lover and cuckolded husband are paraded through crowded streets, and the town of Kreshev itself goes up in flames. The Devil had done his work and a just God had done his.

COVENANT WITH DEATH, by John Harris (442 pp.; Sloane; $4.95). At 7:30 a.m. on July 1, 1916, a Yorkshire battalion of 795 men went into battle on the Somme. By midday 717 of them were dead. Most were killed in the first ten minutes. That is the morning toward which John Harris’ novel moves, the covenant with death which the reader knows from the start will be kept. It is that inevitability, not any tease of suspense, that is the motive power of the book. The characters, more recognizable than revealing, are like a familiar old group photograph that has been animated. They all have that distant, poignant air of youths standing carelessly and gracefully with their arms about each other, smiling lightly across the years as if they had just stopped singing. And now not only the singing has stopped but, through five decades of blood and change, the song itself has been lost.