Surprise Around the Corner

THE WRONG SET (239 pp.)--Angus Wilson--Morrow ($3).

These 13 remarkably unpleasant stories represent the first two years of work by a rising new British author. Angus Wilson is a 36-year-old Oxford man now working in the British Museum Library in London. He has large, sad, slightly protuberant eyes, the mournful, darkling air of most younger British writers, and a considerable reputation in some unexpected quarters. Sean O'Faolain has hailed him as a writer of the first rank; Vogue says his "mind has the sudden round-the-corner surprise of Saki."

Unlike Saki (H. H. Munro), however, Author Wilson builds the surprise around the corner almost invariably on one or the other of two things--the frustration and humiliation of oldish, plainish women, or the twisted compulsions of sexual perversion. With these dark themes, he sets out to expose a whole gallery of frauds, hypocrites, opportunists and pretentious bores. The result is a fearsome commentary on the viciousness and depravity of humankind.

In Totentanz, a trick clause in a will and the brightness of an over-perceptive pansy bring about the downfall of the socially ambitious wife of a university professor. In a winsome domestic scene from A Visit in Bad Taste, a man newly released from prison, where he has done time for a sexual offense against a child, is encouraged by his sister to commit suicide. In Raspberry Jam, a little boy goes to tea with two old ladies, both of them drunks and one a nymphomaniac; they get him tipsy, and after telling him about an Italian lover she once bought, the nymphomaniac plucks and disembowels a live bullfinch under the child's eyes. So it goes on, to the last story, in which a male cocotte humiliates a middle-aged woman he dislikes by luring her husband back to the homosexuality he gave up after his marriage.

What keeps the whole collection from descending to the merely pathological is an undercurrent of compassion and a ruthless economy of phrase that never slashes when it can slice and never slices when it can probe. None of the stories has a surplus word or a spare character. In every one, the situation is stripped down to its essentials and developed with a sure swiftness and precision. Unpleasant as they are, his first stories put Author Wilson near the head of the class.

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