NEW NOVELS

Squibs & pastels

HENRY TUBE Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts Donald Barthelme (Cape 25s) House of the Sleeping Beauties Yasunari Kawabata, translated by Edward G. Seiden- sticker (The Quadriga Press 42s) Penguin Modern Stories 1 William Sansom, Jean Rhys, David Plante, Bernard Mala- mud (Penguin 4s) A Love Match Barbara Skelton (Alan Ross 30s) Joy of the Worm Frank Sargeson (Mac- Gibbon and Kee 30s) Summer Fires Lorna Pegram (MacGibbon and Kee 30s) The Guru and the Golf Club David Bene- dictus (Anthony Blond 30s)

If some eager, but innocent bystander, having put himself into the orbit of a suit- ably representative literary circle, were to inquire: 'How goes it, my friends, with the short story?' he would probably receive two contrary opinions. The first, that the short story was dying on its feet and that the reason was chiefly a lack of markets. The second, that the short story was flourishing and burgeoning all over the place. Both would be right, since they would not be speaking of the same kind of short story. The dying kind is the more familiar. Essentially an offshoot of the naturalistic novel, its virtues lie in the accurate observa- tion of sociological or psychological detail, in the isolation of a single particle of ex- perience, or in the portrayal of a single character. It has become etiolated by time and over-use, declining into a sort of aca- demic water-colour, pallid and flabby, awash with sentimental melancholia. Small wonder if it lacks markets.

The second kind works more like a fire- work display. Packing a great deal of matter into a confined space, using a short fuse, it achieves a sudden explosion. Borges has written, in the prologue to The Garden of Forking Paths: To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary.' A writer who follows his example can release the bright lights of fantasy, set the catherine wheels of imagination spinning, as he could never do at the length of a novel.

Witness Donald Barthelme's Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, as entertaining a

collection of bangs, flashes and coloured bursts as you might wish to find. Edgar, taking the National Writers' Examination for the third time, cannot put a middle to his beginning and end; an unnamed nar- rator spreads an enormous balloon over Manhattan and observes people's reactions —they quickly accept it, of course: 111 be at that place where it dips down into Forty- seventh Street almost to the sidewalk, near the Alamo Chile House'; two officers guard a nuclear installation deep below some desert ('Shotwell plays jacks and I write descriptions of natural forms on the walls'); someone else sets out `to study cardinals, about whom science knows nothing.' Mr Barthelme is a shrewd satirist, but nowhere more shrewd than in recognising how ideal the short story form is for his purposes.

House of the Sleeping Beauties by the Japanese Nobel prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, though set in our time, belongs to an earlier tradition of heightened short story, in which the subject-matter remains fairly naturalistic but is subordinated to the style, shape and resonance of the telling.

Faintly reminiscent, for English readers, of Isak Dinesen, this beautiful work describes a brothel where an old man spends five separate nights beside girls who have been drugged asleep. The sadness of these one- way encounters, their subtle variety, make

no pale effect, but have rather the sharp- ness of those pen drawings where every

gradation of light and shade is precisely noted. The two other stories in the same book are slighter versions of the same themes and techniques.

According to the introduction to Penguin Modern Stories 1, 'we believe in the short

story, know that a great many of the best

contemporary writers are working in this form' and intend to supply a market for

them four times a year. Hats off to Pen- guin. But, alas, a small misunderstanding mars this laudable venture: all the stories in the first volume belong to the dying, not the burgeoning kind. True, the virtues of Jean Rhys's 'Temps Perdi' take it outside the generalisation, but the rest are fair examples of how, why and where the rot set in. It is the more distressing in that Pen-

guin have already published at least two volumes—Latin American Writing Today and Short Stories in Spanish—which signally proclaim the new vigour of the form.

The best of this week's novels are the most apparently artless. Barbara Skelton's

A Love Match is a kind of updated version of Michael Arlen's The Green Hat, but without the grand romantic gestures. Its

special pleasure lies entirely in its tone of voice, which is what one might call scatty, as of a person at a party telling you anecdotes at high speed while at the same

time looking out for new arrivals and signalling for a drink. Joy of the Worm, by

the New Zealand writer Frank Sargeson, is a leisurely and somewhat old-fashioned account of an egotistical father and his ego- tistical son. The father is a clergyman and

his son appropriately becomes one—it is as though Jane Austen's Mr Collins had been

blessed with issue. Mr Sargeson's sense of humour is quiet and constant and it is miraculous the way he whisks countless

opportunities for melodrama (which would have been most drearily seized by lesser novelists) out from under one's feet just in time.

Lorna Pegram's Summer Fires, the story of a composer who lives in a Suffolk farm-

house with a harem of women, is written entirely in the present tense. The effect is

to make it read like a synopsis, and the pat psychological insights, the obligatory descriptive passages, confirm that this is really all the book is—a layout of plot, characters and scene waiting to have life breathed into them by, perhaps, Iris Mur- doch. David Benedictus, in The Guru and the Golf Club, invokes the Dylan Thomas of Under Milk Wood for his account of the temporary loan of Oriental Wisdom and aphrodisiac to a spiritually and sexually undernourished slice of suburban England. Mr Benedictus has no interest in ither his stereotyped characters or the situations he arranges for them to be found in, but his book has the good-natured appeal of a kind of rambling bed-time story, whose teller likes the sound of words and even more the sound of his own voice stringing them together.