The Poor Devil

LET IT COME DOWN (311 pp.)--Paul Bowles--Random House ($3.50).

Nelson Dyar, American, was "not at all distinguished in appearance. He did not look like an actor or a statesman or an artist, nor yet like a workman, a businessman or an athlete." Moreover, when the Marquesa de Valverde peered into his palm, she could see "no sign of anything ... an empty hand."

Out of Nelson's empty hand, nonetheless, Novelist Paul (The Sheltering Sky) Bowles has tried to create a modern hero. Dyar is not a man, he is a vacuum. His only deep desire is to fill his own emptiness. He throws up his job as a New York bank teller, takes ship to Tangier, and waits for things to happen to him--any things, so long as they are solid enough to give him the feeling of being in touch with reality.

Tangier is only too ready to oblige. Like bugs out of the woodwork, a string of unsavory characters creeps into Dyar's empty world. There is Hadija, an Arab prostitute, who gives him the illusion that he is capable of falling in love. There is Jack Wilcox, an American black-marketeer, who turns Dyar into an accomplice in his currency deals. There is Madame Jouvenon, the Soviet agent who hands him a fat check for "small bits of information." Before long, Dyar is able to feel that he is no longer "supremely anonymous." By the end of the novel, he has become an undeniably real person: he is hiding out on a mountain top, alone in the world save for the body of the man he has murdered.

Novels whose "heroes" are impotent victims of life are at least as old as Franz Kafka and his stories of Central European decay (TIME, April 28, 1947). Let It Come Down shows the point such novels have reached in the last decade or two. In the Kafka world, the victim-hero was still able to react to his miseries with horror. In the Bowles world, the victim-hero is both amoral and numb. He will commit any crime in order to give himself the feeling of having "a place in the world, a definite status, a precise relationship with the rest of men."

As a portrait of such a character, Let It Come Down has the merits of clarity, intelligence and melodrama. Its great weakness is that the numbness of the sitter has got into the artist. Like Dyar, Bowles seems incapable of involving himself in at least half the realities of life. He makes his job easy by playing down characters and incidents that might fill his hero's emptiness with something more amiable than smuggling and murder. He exposes Dyar's hungry soul to every temptation except the temptation to take a brace. In this way, Bowles takes most of the wind out of his own sails. The Devil likes to be given his due, but he is too much of a realist to ask for a walkover.

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