Home Run Genius. By Patrick Dennis. (Barker, 18s.) The Hotel

Room. By Agnar Mykle. Translated

18s.)

Electra. By Henry Treece. (Bodley Head, 18s.) PRESUMABLY Bernard Malamud's first novel has been kept from us for ten years on the assump- tion that the British reading public could not cope with a novel about baseball until its author had achieved top ranking. Such solicitude was mis- placed: given a minimal interest in sport, and assisted by Mr. Malamud's own notes on the game, any reader will enjoy this dazzling boor. On the other hand it must be admitted that a passing acquaintance with the Grail legend, if only via Jessie Weston and The Waste Land, is a help to full appreciation. Roy Hobbs's ambition to excel in baseball has the significance of a Quest; he bears a magic weapon, the bat he made himself and calls Wonderboy; he plays for a team called the Knights; he seeks to restore the wasted kingdom of the disappointed team - manager, called Pop Fisher; and his career is persistently frustrated by seductive enchantresses and wicked magicians. 'He said that this was the shame in his life, that his fate, somehow, had always been the same (on the train going no- where)—defeat in sight of his goal.' In this interweaving of professional baseball and myth there is something of a gifted young writer's exhibitionism, an arrogant display of vir- tuosity which just occasionally gets out of hand. But it is much, much more than a literary exer- cise. Sport is perhaps the last area of modern life which offers us heroes, yet the writer who wishes to make use of them does so in a cloud of clichés and stereotypes created by journalism, films, juvenile literature, etc. By treating his sub-

ject mythopoeically, Malamud gives a nevi beauty and nobility to the athletic drama without sacrificing any excitement.

More modest in its ambitions, but a little masterpiece nevertheless, is Inside Mr. Enderby. The eponymous hero is a middle-aged poet of

distinction. The author convinces us of the dis- tinction not only through the quality of his casual observation CA lone midget cauliflower swam like a doll's brain in dense pickle') but through poems which are liberally quoted and very attractive.

Like many gifted writers Enderby is what Cam- bridge critics would call immature. He lives alone in a squalid seaside flat, writing always while sitting on the lavatory, trousers rituallY lowered, an electric fire toasting his bared legs, the bath full of rejected drafts, breadcrusts and mice. He is a lapsed Catholic. He is haunted bY the memory of his gross stepmother (a superblY Rabelaisian portrait) who has inhibited him from

forming an adult sexual relationship, though he has his furtive substitutes. He is a mess, but quite happy and very productive.

Then he is lured to London by the presentation of a literary prize, and life begins to infiltrate his precious isolation. He is adopted by a smart,

sophisticated woman journalist who marries hirn, tidies him up, spends his savings, and takes him

to Rome where she smothers him with unwanted culture and religion. Every day she becomes more like his stepmother. Distracted, Enderby takes flight, and the story veers into the familiar night- mare of the modern artist, in which the outsider is gently remoulded by •State medicine and

psychiatry into a complacent, sterile insider. A sad story, but from first page to last it is absurdlY, outrageously funny. Not to be missed. Genius is a funny book by the successful author of other funny books, such as Auntie Mame, and it would be a hard man who did not

laugh, or at least snigger, quite a lot at its story of a rogue film director frantically staving off ex-wives and the income tax authorities while he tries to make a cheap art-film in .Mexico. But the laughter rarely has the gusty, liberating

quality of that aroused by Mr. Kell. It is a condi- tioned response to the manipulations of a skilled professional. And I found Mr. Dennis's introduc- tion of himself into the story, as a rich, successful, much-courted professional writer of funny books, as archly embarrassing as the guest appearances

in movies of film-stars in their own persons. fie and his wife are invited to a party to represent Contemporary Light Fiction, and I suppose that .

is fair enough. Genius is painless entertainment. The Hotel Room is an early novel by the Nor- wegian writer who won considerable acclaim and notoriety with Lasso Round the Moon. A

court-room, in which the hero is on trial for having assaulted an hotel employee who spied on his latest amorous adventure, serves as the setting for a series of flashbacks (mainly erotic) and polemical essays on the condition of NorwaY where, according to the author, the Nordic urge towards adventure and fulfilment is blocked at every turn by conformity, provincialism and puritanism. Unfortunately nothing distinguishes the hero from a promiscuous thug except the quality of his consciousness, and even this makes

one uneasy at times. Like so much modern litera- ture of rebellion, The Hotel Room beats its head against a moral brick wall, but there is enough authentic literary energy to carry one along.

There seems to be a growing tendency to work the seams of Hellenic myth with the tools of realistic fiction. Mr. Treece does it very skilfullY. The autobiography his aged Electra relates to a sceptical barbarian doctor never releases its grip on the reader. But one cannot resist questioning

the point of the exercise. The tale of the royal house of MyeenEe is gruesome enough as handed down by Homer, Sophocles and the other ancients, but it has a kind of grandeur. Demyth- ologised it becomes a story of near-savages, driven by lust, greed and low cunning. In the absence of any satiric motive such as inspires Shakespeare's Troilus, one cannot help wonder- ing what reasons (and what evidence) Mr. Treece has for making Electra a Lesbian and common Whore, Nestor a dirty old man, and the Trojan War a put-up job.

DAVID LODGE