The Need for Risks

THIS HAPPY RURAL SEAT (270 pp )--George Lanning--World ($3.50).

Fifty years ago, Henry James wrote The Beast in the Jungle, a masterful short novel about an aging man who discovers too late, that life has slipped by him. This week 27-year-old George Lanning publishes This Happy Rural Seat, a brilliant first novel in which he spins some subtle variations on the Jamesian theme of the unlived life. A onetime staff member of the highbrow Kenyan Review, Lanning shows a gift for creating complex human beings that marks him as one of the ablest new novelists in some time.

Lanning's hero, Herbert Komar, is about as unheroic as a man can be. A timid accountant whose pleasures are as small as his appetites, he has managed to reach 60 without marriage, love or any other risk.

After work, Komar eats in a drab restaurant, chats with the waitress, and goes home to the rooming house in which he has lived for ten years. Sometimes his landlady invites him down for an evening of bridge, and tuna-fish sandwiches. "He was aware of the larger possibilities of life, the beautiful, excruciating entanglements that other people got into, and survived, but these required an enormous effort, and in his observation were rarely worth it; he liked better the passing warmth that asked nothing of him beyond the moment's courtesy or interest."

Suitor at 60? Recently Komar has become restless; he thinks of living in a house of his own. He will hardly admit it to himself, but this is really one way of getting ready for death. For "there was something awful and sad about old men dying in rented rooms."

At first, it seems simple. Blanche Loyd, a real-estate agent, offers to sell the old house in which she lives with Lily, her blind, 80-year-old mother. But Komar soon discovers that he is becoming entangled with people rather than buying a house. Blanche Loyd is the first woman in years who can ruffle the dull passage of his life. The ancient Lily, still brimming with life, jeeringly mistakes him for still another of her daughter's suitors--or pretends to, since she does not want to sell the house. Both of them challenge Komar's ineffectual mildness. Lily Loyd calls him a cipher, and Blanche, driven by love and loneliness, says: "The Herbert Komars of the world seem to me to do great wrong: that is, they do nothing at all." Bewildered and aroused, Komar wonders to himself, as he compares the life of the Loyds with his own, what he has missed.

Life & the Living. Where James ended The Beast in the Jungle with a gesture of despair, Novelist Lanning allows his hero to discover that life is never beyond the reach of the living. He will marry Blanche too late ... but not too late."

George Lanning is not yet an impeccable craftsman. His book is occasionally set at too high a pitch. Like many serious young novelists, he has too great a fear of saying explicitly what he means. The influence of James still lies heavily on his style. But these flaws are minor by comparison with his achievement.

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