Books: Also Current: Jul. 24, 1964

ON ICE by Jack Gelber. 311 pages. Macmillan. $4.95.

Jack Gelber’s first play, The Connection, was set half a league to hellward of the boundary where bohemianism shades into crime and insanity. Its heroes were heroin addicts, its dialogue had the tape-recorder hiss of genuine desperation, and the result was a 32-month run off-Broadway. Gelber’s first novel seemingly starts off to make that same scene. Marijuana smoke curls up from the pages; the characters are mostly Greenwich Village idiots. But though the chief idiot, Manny Fells, has lowered himself by his own bootstraps into the right kind of roach-ridden Manhattan loft studio, he is neither junkie nor jazzman but a 26-year-old adolescent with tired blood. Hunger, and doubtless boredom, drives him to nothing more desperate than a temporary Christmastime job with a schlock detective agency. The agency lends him a car, car and cash attract a girl friend, and his upfall is assured. Author Gelber’s anteroom to hell has become a shabby little way station on the train ride to suburbia.

THE STONE ANGEL by Margaret Laurence. 308 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

Margaret Laurence is a 37-year-old Canadian whose publishers have taken the “unusual gamble” of bringing out three of her books on the same day. The Stone Angel, her second novel, is accompanied by a first collection of short stories, The Tomorrow-Tamer, and a travel book, New Wind in a Dry-Land. Although she does not live up to her publishers’ extravagant billing, she demonstrates in The Stone Angel that she has a true novelist’s gift for catching a character in mid-passion and life at full flood. The character is Hagar Shipley, who mixes past and present indiscriminately, telling now of her efforts to avoid the old ladies’ home to which her son wishes to send her, now of the life she led as a girl and a young bride at a bleak crossroads town on the Canadian prairie, now of the small, ugly ways in which her body, at 90, has betrayed her. As she daydreams and chatters and lurches through the novel, she traces one of the most convincing—and the most touching—portraits of an unregenerate sinner declining into senility since Sara Monday went to her reward in Joyce Gary’s The Horse’s Mouth.

PATH OF DALLIANCE by Auberon Waugh. 284 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.95.

Auberon Waugh wrote his first novel, he explained, because it was what was expected of him in a literary family: Father Evelyn wrote Decline and Fall at 25, and Uncle Alec wrote The Loom of Youth at 19. Having produced The Foxglove Saga at 21 (“My boy,” his father had told him, “it is time you wrote your first book”), Auberon announced his retirement from literature. It is a shame he changed his mind. Foxglove Saga was modeled rather too closely after Decline and Fall—but at least it was funny. Path of Dalliance is modeled on the same book, but is a bore. The trouble seems to be that Auberon has become a little bored with his father’s titled ghosts, and he somehow never puts them in motion. As they meander through Oxford together, their languid adventures seem more pathetic than comic—for the good reason that they belong to a world that disappeared just about the time Evelyn was writing its obituary. It is a little like seeing Buster Keaton hurl a custard pie into empty air.

TRIAL AT MONOMOY by John Masters. 341 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.

Since the early ’50s, John Masters has turned out eleven books, most of them set against the Kipling backdrop of India under British rule. Bhowani Junction (1954), probably the best-known, was snapped up by Hollywood as a starring vehicle for Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger. Novelist Masters has now tried his first U.S. setting. His fans are in for a letdown. There is no suggestion of the exotic about town meetings in a Cape Cod village, and Ava Gardner would not think of playing the prissy schoolmarm who passes for a heroine. But Masters’ whole troupe could be rounded up in half an hour by Central Casting. There is the young floozy with a heart of gold, the first selectman who drinks, the third selectman who paints nudes on the sly, the young aristocrat who comes home with a beautiful Negro fiancée—and many more. By way of catharsis, they are all herded into a snowbound village hotel. Who will crumble, who will turn out to be true-blue? Since the main business of Hollywood these days is making films for TV, a weekly series based on Trial at Monomoy might run forever.