Mixed Fiction

DON GASTONE AND THE LADIES, by Goffredo Parise (257 pp.; Knopf; $3.50), is less a novel than a wedge of life sliced from the rotting melon of a prewar Italian slum and served up with no prosciutto of plot, pretense or preaching. The heroes are two urchins: nine-year-old Sergio and his friend and idol, wicked, ten-year-old Cena. Together the boys starve and steal, beg and brawl, and observe with bright-eyed interest the passing show of the squalid tenement in which they live.

Star of that show is Don Gastone Caoduro, a vain and shallow young priest. He is worshiped by the spinsters of the parish, but is more eager for his own material success than the welfare of his flock. In time Don Gastone yields to the temptation of his own virility and the steaming charm of Fedora, a local wanton. Both Don Gastone and young Cena meet harsh and dreadful fates, but their retribution seems less an act of divine providence than plain bad luck. The book glints with realism, wit and sordid detail. Author Parise, a young (25) product of the slums he writes about, has caught the pungent smells and vivid color, the humor and wretchedness of an Italy that the tourists never see.

WATERFRONT, by Budd Schulberg (320 pp.; Random House; $3.95). The film, says Budd Schulberg, "has no time for what I call the essential digressions . . . On the Waterfront left me with an irresistible conviction that there was still far more to say than could possibly be included in my screen play." Obeying that conviction, Novelist Schulberg has put into a book all the things Scriptwriter Schulberg did not get said on the screen. The result might easily have been warmed-over celluloid. It is not.

The novel tells a gripping story of New York's wrangle-tangle harbor and the crooked union that runs it; it catches in detail the degradation and the dignity, the filth and the faith of the dock-wallopers who unload--and pilfer--its cargoes. In the movie Terry Malloy (played by Marlon Brando) breaks the waterfront code of silence after the mob kills his brother, and gives a state investigating commission enough evidence to start a massive waterfront cleanup. The climax shows him staggering back to his job, followed by the honest longshoremen. The novel's ending is possibly more realistic: Malloy's reward for squealing is 27 stab wounds, "apparently inflicted by an ice pick," and burial in a barrel of lime. Another difference is in the dialogue: the novel is crammed with lingo as crude as a cargo hook ("You're a pimple on the ass o'progress. Disappear").

In the "essential digressions" Schulberg has added, he has given depth to some unforgettable minor characters, e.g., Luke, the Negro foreman from Alabama ("I jest hopped me a choo-choo and sayed 'No'oth here I comes' "). While the movie focused on Terry Malloy, the novel's real hero is Father Barry, the chain-smoking Irish priest who prays for "the wisdom and the know-how and the moxie" to fight for waterfront reform.

THE TONTINE, by Thomas B. Costain (2 vols., 930 pp.; Doubleday; $5.95), is Author Costain's eighth novel, a Literary Guild choice for October, and may serve only one useful purpose: to popularize the fascinating gimmick referred to in the title. The tontine (rhymes with "on green"), a fad which keeps reappearing through history, combines the suspense of the $64,000 question with the finances of the pyramid club. In Costain's tontine, begun in England just after the Battle of Waterloo, people in each of eight age groups enter the setup at 100 guineas a head. The money and interest are invested for 20 years; the interest is split annually among the survivors. As others die, those left behind gleefully rake in more dough until one person takes all.

Into the youngest class of the Waterloo tontine went the children of Samuel Car boy and George Grace, two partners whose business marriage has ended in divorce owing to incompatibility. Alongside these wealthy kids, the daughter of Carboy's groom, Nell Groody, also joins. Then Author Costain relentlessly chronicles the lives of these participants, down to the tonteeniest detail. Carboy's daughter works her way through a series of polite flirtations (not a bedroom scene in 930 pages) from baronet's wife to duchess, while Grace's son parlays a naval career into a knighthood. After much 19th century history drifts by like a Bristol fog, Carboy's great-grandson and Grace's great-grand-bastard reconstitute the old partnership. In the end, of course, it is Nell, the groom's daughter, who wins. She dies after giving every tuppence to the poor.

Under Costain's pen, the tontine loses all drama and suspense, becomes simply a century-long marathon dance of unreal, Victorian marionettes.

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