NEW NOVELS
Laymen
CLEMENT FREUD
The Do-Gooders Alfred Grossmann (Heine- mann 25s) A Horse's Head Evan Hunter (Constable 25s) The Sinner's Bell Kevin Casey (Faber 25s) The current market leader in fiction (More Than Six Million Copies Have Already Been Sold) is Valley of the Dolls. On the basis of looking at ICI before embarking on share trans- actions, it seemed reasonable to read what was selling before digging into the books with sales ambition. Sex is selling. My favourite book re- view, by a ten year old girl, runs as follows : 'This book tells me more about polar bears than I really wanted to know.' If you substitute the word nymphomaniac for polar bear, the same could be said of Valley of the Dolls. It is a nasty book, without literary merit; what is worse, it constantly promises to be nastier than it is. The characterisation is so flimsy that when you get to the really unpleasant parts you have the un- easy feeling they were added by a sub-editor : 'Great first draft,' said someone; 'filthy it up a bit, Charlie.'
I know not whether Messrs Grossman, Hunter or Casey have read Miss Susann's book, but each in turn, in the cause of commerce, dedication or art, has characters who become brazenly involved in the sexual act in a way that publishers would have rejected out of hand five years ago. Let us call them contemporary novels.
Mr Grossman's book is hilarious, though his full message is far from clear. If I interpret the plot correctly, the set-up consists of the first person singular called Kennan, whose wife had big breasts and left him. He lodges with a young woman who, on the dust-cover, 'married and murdered a loathsome millionaire—and has an income twice that of the newly emerged state of Ghana.' Actually, in the book she is the recipient of an income twice that of the emerg- ing state of Egypt. What the hell.
She keeps employing maids for the conveni- ence of the first person singular, which might have gone on indefinitely but for the fact that on page 17 the couple get a letter from a high- class procurer. They decide to ask him for a six- foot, passionate, red-headed Jewish virgin aged forty, to be supplied by 12.25 p.m. the follow- ing day. And somehow they meet Spider, who spends much of the rest of the book telling first person singular to go away while he lays the rich widow—so we go back to the servants' quarters. There are a few bewildering sorties that achieve such doubtful bits of do-gooding as giving crab-lice to mid-westerners and blow- ing up a nine-lane highway—at which 'I' gotta home and has a last four-letter word with the cook. The book has a certain charm.
Evan Hunter (who wrote Blackboard Jungle) takes as his theme a loser: an encyclopaedia salesman who leaves his over-sexed red-headed wife for the racetrack and the dream of laying Cleopatra-like women. His troubles start when he is kidnapped, put into a black suit and placed in a coffin—because for some reason that is not made very clear a gang of crooks reckon that the best way to smuggle diamonds out of the United States is to embed them in the plastic buttons of a jacket, put the jacket on a man, kill him and ship the corpse to Rome in the aforesaid coffin. But, for the sake of continuity, Mullaney, the loser, is not killed and spends the book getting away from people. He also lays two women, neither of whom con- siders him to be the lover we all hoped he would be. There is a good deal of flashing back to the red-headed wife—and when Mullaney finally refuses to shoot three men and abandons the half-million-dollar jacket in the crema- torium, he uses ten of his last fifteen cents to ring her with a view to a reconciliation. I would have taken 15-8 against her saying yes, but she did. This is a potboiler by a very efficient soup-cook.
The Sinner's Bell is Irish and comes in the 'tone poem' school of literature. Mr Casey writes well, but in choosing for his subject a sympathetic Irish working-class virgin who quite inexplicably agrees to marry a pathetically sadistic illegitimate son of an alcoholic publi- can who touched her nipple when she was fourteen . . . he may have closed too many avenues of literary escape. In fact, once stuck on this financial, social and romantic level, all he can manage by way of light relief from the stark mists of marriage is a squalid alfresco fornication with a chambermaid. Yet the book is readable. Indignities follow rapidly on each other's heels and the aura of catholicism makes everything that takes place seem that much more reprehensible.
I was personally unhappy about the length of time it took the destitute, brandy-swilling, alcoholic publican to go bankrupt, but, after all, this was never intended to be recommended reading for the licensed victuallers' trade or business efficiency consultants.
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