Life with Father

MR. NICHOLAS (271 pp.) -- Thomas Hinde--Farrar, Sfraus & Young ($3).

Mr. Nicholas was a tyrant, but it is doubtful that he knew it. Living a life of pointless leisure in a London suburb, Nicholas was always searching for objects to attack. His three quailing sons, his disspirited wife, even the ants in his garden. At breakfast the family waited nervously for his spluttering comments on the news, alternating with loud, wet spoonfuls of porridge. He started a "Defend Britain Club" to save the country from dangerous ideas and to raise the standards of cricket.

He was also a great one for man-to-man chats with his sons, wearing down their spirits with his hearty bullying ("Either this is my house or it's not"). For Mr. Nicholas had very strict notions about family conduct, though they did not keep him from dashing off on an occasional weekend with a woman known as "Pussy." As for his wife, "he was fond of her in the way that he might have been fond of something inanimate, like a useful car."

As a portrait of a domestic autocrat, Mr. Nicholas makes grimly impressive reading. Thomas Hinde is not quite the "white hope" of English letters that Novelist Henry (Loving) Green calls him in a jacket blurb, but at 27, after brief careers as a sailor, private tutor and circus hand, Hinde has put together an expert novel. His storytelling is done in meticulously understated style, but beneath its bland surface, Mr. Nicholas is relentless in its exploration of a quiet, homey little English hell.

Mrs. Nicholas fades away into her kitchen, one son retires to a private world of noisy chemical experiments, another runs away from home. Even on his sickbed, Mr. Nicholas dominates and blights everyone within his reach. The book has one major flaw: none of the other characters is strong enough to stand up to father for a minute. As a result, Novelist Hinde loses a dramatic chance to test him against any kind of opposition. But Mr. Nicholas, in his walkover, is as believable as a bad dream in which everything is both distorted and true at the same time.

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