Suffering for Nothing

THE VICTIM (294 pp.)--Saul Bellow--Vanguard ($2.75).

On the surface, this is a competent little story about a solemn and touchy Jew accused by a fantastic Gentile of having ruined him. But, until a disastrously out-of-key final chapter, it has troubling depths of meaning which make it unusual among new novels.

Asa Leventhal is living alone in his Manhattan apartment while his wife helps her mother move to Charleston. In the barbaric heat of late August he is beset by a nearly forgotten old acquaintance, Kirby Allbee. Down & out, dirty, half drunk, Allbee turns up to jeer at Asa, "discussing" with him a guilt that is both preposterous and somehow plausible.

Away from the Ruined. Six years before, Asa had been headstrong enough to throw up a civil service job in Baltimore, taking his chances in Manhattan. He had been lucky to land the good job that he still held. Allbee had been a chance friend of the period when he was job hunting. One of his vain interviews had been with Allbee's boss, who had been rude to him and to whom he had been rude in return. Now he learns that Allbee had been fired soon afterward and holds him responsible. Allbee has it figured out that Asa had hated him for his anti-Jewish remarks and had chosen to get even by subtly discrediting Allbee with his boss. When Asa tells him furiously that he's crazy, Allbee only grins and goes on talking.

"It's necessary for you to believe that I deserve what I get. It doesn't enter your mind, does it--that a man might not be able to help being hammered down? . . . And do you know what? It's a Jewish point of view. You'll find it all over the Bible. God doesn't make mistakes. He's the department of weights and measures. If you're okay, he's okay, too. That's what Job's friends come and say to him. But I'll tell you something. We do get it in the neck for nothing and suffer for nothing, and there's no denying that evil is as real as sunshine. . . ."

Home to Roost. The relationship between Leventhal and Allbee takes on curious new dimensions. Though Leventhal, in his blundering way, seems dark, powerful and stern, he is a prey to suspicions and frights that are the counterparts of Allbee's. When Allbee, evicted from his furnished room, moves in to live with him, the intimation is hard to miss that Leventhal's alter ego, his subconscious share in the general ills and abandonments of humanity, has come home to roost.

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