The Lost Effort

THE OUTER EDGES (240 pp.)--CAar/es Jackson--Rineharf ($2.75).

Charles Jackson has written six novels; only three (including The Lost Weekend and The Fall of Valor) have been published. His latest should have stayed in the trunk.

Like his others, The Outer Edges is a sort of chapter from Freud-made-easy; it burrows clinically into some untidy closets of human guilt and frustration. In his first book, he managed to put most of his readers in a dipsomaniac's shoes. In his second, on homosexuality, he was nowhere near so persuasive. Now he has written about a grisly rape-murder case to prove that, vicariously at least, there is something of the murderer in everybody.

The criminal, 16-year-old, moronic Aaron Adams, is unimportant to the story. So are his two little-girl victims whom he picked up on their way to school. What really matters, says Jackson, is the effect of the crime, as the tabloids play all its angles across the board, on the minds of you-and-you-and-you. Using an unimaginative hopscotch technique, he jumps from one character to another and back again, winds up with a notebook full of unconvincing case histories. Samples: P:Handsome Jim Harron, a well-paid New York publicity man, is unnerved, then regenerated, by the crime and a visit to the victim's father. The effect on Harron is to make him see that he must return to his estranged wife. P: Fan French, an idle Westchester matron, is thrilled to realize that she had been accosted by the murderer before the crime. The upshot for her: unsatisfactory adultery with a radio announcer. P:A young, mentally unbalanced, would-be writer is stimulated by the newspaper stories to desire to duplicate the crime. P: A little Manhattan girl, her imagination fired, falsely accuses an innocent tailor of molesting her.

There are several others. But Jackson fails to do with his material what Dostoevsky might have done.

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