NEW NOVELS

Artless dodgers

HENRY TUBE

Morning, Noon and Night James Gould Coz- zens (Longmans 30s) The Sophomore Barry Spacks (Collins 21s) Cosmicomics Italo Calvin° translated by William Weaver (Cape 25s) The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born Ayi Kwei Armah (Heinemann Educational Books 25s) This review is in two parts. The reader is asked to peruse the first part in a random manner letting his eye rove here and there as the f cy takes him. The second part is to be re con- secutively in the normal way.

B. S. Johnson has had the idea of selling his new novel, The Unfortunates, in the form of separate chapters gathered in a box instead of sewn together between covers.

The narrator revisits a city in order to report football match and recalls certain people and experiences connected with the city, in particu- lar a close friend of his who died miserably at an early age.

The point being that the reader may shuffle the chapters about and read them in any order; thus recapturing for himself the random antics of memory, of experience.

Not a bad idea. Mr Johnson's publishers wguld go further, calling The Unfortunates 'one of the most seriously and startlingly experimental works to appear on the British literary scene.' But here is the nub: granted the undoubted if obvious truth that memory and experience play random antics with our minds and that we are apt to forget this truth when the author of a novel re-orders memory and experience for us in the arbitrary form of a sewn-together book, of what quality are the memory and ex- perience that Mr Johnson here exposes for us in random order?

Not too high.

Mr Johnson's style veers sharply between the flat and the mannered. His pitch is the banal, but in attempting to avoid the clichés of litera- ture, he falls with a dull thud into the clichés of life, the shallow superficialities of thought and deed that dog us all.

When he is not imitating S. Beckett. His man- nered style is Mr Beckett's, even down to cer- tain specific words and phrases, but, alas, with- out the master's expressive powers. In Mr Johnson's hands the style becomes pure man- nerism.

The whole infused with a flaccid melancholy for the death of his friend. Nothing is ex- plored, nothing illuminated.

Have you read this in random order? Does it make the slightest difference? Mr Johnson might try selling his next novel in three colours on a roll of bus-ticket, but he'd do better to concentrate on what is read than the manner of its reading.

James Gould Cozzens's Morning, Noon and Night must come as a sad disappointment to admirers of his earlier novels. Like B. S. John- son, Mr Cozzens has been at some pains to shuffle up the incidents he relates, so as to reproduce the life of his narrator as it occurs • to him when old. Curiously he, too, though one would think he was a far more experi- enced and confident writer than Mr Johnson, has felt the need to borrow other men's styles, calling on Henry James for sentence construc- tion and Shakespeare for expressive backbone: 'We are told that one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages . . .' It is not entirely surprising, then, to discover that these formal and stylistic dodges fail to camou- flage a vacuum almost as total as Mr John- son's, a lack of goods in inverse proportion to the elaboration of the delivery service.

For reasons unknown, except that he works on an American campus, Barry Spacks has chosen, in his first novel The Sophomore, to write a campus novel. Anyone could have told him that he was walking straight into a grave- yard, that unless' he spoke with the tongues of angels and possessed the imagination of. a Dante, he would disappear without trace. Per- haps that was the challenge; the novel about contemporary swinging London has presented the same sort of fatal fascination to British aspirants. Mr Spacks writes pleasantly, has a sense of humour and flashes of imagination, but with sad inevitability the dust of innumer- able predecessors swallows him up.

We are left with the two points of light in an otherwise gloomy week for fiction. In his extra- ordinary novel Cosrnicomics Italo Calvino weaves chapters of fantasy out of the evolu- tion of the universe. Starting from such un- likely material as: 'When the galaxies become more remote, the rarefaction of the universe is compensated for by the formation of further galaxies composed of newly created matter,' S. Calvin° imagines his narrator Qfwfq as present and participating. Thus The more dis- tant a galaxy is, the more swiftly it moves away from us' inspires Qfwfq to tell us how he saw

a distant galaxy displaying the sign SAW YOU.' He realises that two hundred million years earlier he had been observed in compro- mising circumstances. His attempts to explain or at least smooth over his conduct, by dis- playing a sign of his own, lead to greater and greater complications, as other galaxies join the dialogue. The book is marred only by a certain cosiness or childishness which seems to beset imaginative flights into science fantasy of this kind, witness Back to Methuselah, Shaw's worst descent into the nursery.

The Beauty ful Ones Are Not Yet Born, by the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah, is a fine treatment of the theme of corruption in a newly independent African state. Mr Armah's passionate demonstration of the contamination wrought by poverty perhaps rests a little too heavily on the mere description of physical • Olth, but he does not, like so many African novelists, limit himself to the telling of a more or less stock story set in an unfamiliar part of the world. Mr Armah has something to say and I would guess that he has only just begun saying it and will grow more powerful as he grows more precise. •