Mixed Fiction

THE OBSESSION OF EMMET BOOTH, by Martha Albrand (240 pp.; Random House: $3.50), is a psychological suspense story, and the suspense derives from the question whether Beauty will succumb to the Beast. The Beauty of the story, widow of a paragonish professor, is Miranda Page, who looks like something out of Harper's Bazaar but talks like something out of Harper's Magazine. The Beast is not really beastly, merely unpleasant: Emmet Booth is nearly 50, short, balding, a self-made millionaire of lowly origins whose monster of an inferiority feeling must be appeased by constant sacrifices. Unsatiated by business triumphs and carloads of Watteaus, it now demands Miranda.

No two people could be more different --Emmet Booth living in the kind of nouveau riche luxury that always seems rented, Miranda in the shabby comfort of a Greenwich Village house that is acrawl with Siamese cats and intellectual gentility. What Miranda Page would call a "relationship" seems impossible between two people so alien to each other. But as a veteran of suspense fiction (The Mask of Alexander), Author Albrand keeps the plot from collapsing. Booth inexorably moves in on Miranda with hammer locks of misunderstanding. In her politeness he manages to see incipient love, and in his calculated humility she is foolish enough to see kindness.

He pursues her from New York to London with flowers and favors, and, above all, by masterfully playing on her sense of pity--for his pride is so constituted that he can grovel to attain his ends. It is possibly the first time in fiction that a thoroughly unprepossessing man gets a woman to bed by crying a few well-timed tears. Like many suspense stories of a more robust kind, the book does not bear much thinking about once it is put down, but while the story lasts, the reader is firmly held by the question of whether Emmet Booth will finally win. His pursuit of Miranda has the tried and true fascination of that famous cliche from East-of-Suez movies: the beautiful planter's wife playing Chopin while, across the terrace, a large speckled snake glides towards the heroine, ready to strike that lovely neck.

THE LOVING EYE, by. William Sansom (253 pp.; Reynal; $3.50) has a hero who, like Emmet Booth, is obsessed by a woman. Matthew Ligne is about to turn the dread corner of 40 into middle age, accompanied by his faithful ulcer, which bites so vigorously at the wrong moments that it almost assumes the lifelikeness of a pet. Like careful Prufrock ("Do I dare to eat a peach?"), he has heard the mermaids singing each to each. The particular blonde mermaid who obsesses him is a girl only glimpsed behind a window. For Matthew Ligne spends most of his time observing the creatures--married couples, tree surgeons, enterprising alley cats--in the little closed-in world of his backyard. As he watches her from behind a curtain, she becomes a half-real apparition every man has known: "She was the girl seen for a moment on the street, or in a bus, in the park or in the train, anywhere that made her unattainable . . . Her one important quality is her passing. Her merit is anonymity. If you speak to her she vanishes."

Ligne, defying all the rules that govern life's window-shopping, does speak to her --and she almost does vanish. First, Author Sansom, like a skillful illusionist, turns the girl into a pink-haired, wonderfully blowzy tart named Dawn--rosy-fingered Dawn with dirty fingernails. Can this female Falstaff be the vision from behind the window? No--the reader has been nibbling at the wrong sibling: the tart is really the dream girl's sister. But if she has a tart for a sister, how is it that she reads Baudelaire?

Of such stuff are this novel's problems made. British Author Sansom, a perennially promising novelist, perennially just short of being "important," writes--or rather chisels--a remarkable English prose. The lowliest events--a vine climbing, two dance-hall harridans fighting--are described with exquisite and stately care. The result is often like drinking beer from crystal goblets, but just before the goblet threatens to break, Author Sansom puts it down. He changes voices and throws the narration to Hero Ligne's sidekick, who commands an idiom that Damon Runyon might have written had he known Bow Bells as he knew Mindy's. For instance, a glimpse of Dawn: "Over by yon gilded basket of blue hydrangeas flush from a morning mannequin-do and due to serve again to-night when Masons meet to dine--who stands teething on a tasty lobster titbit and undressing our great big thumping toastmaster with her naughty little peepers, but a lady larger than life itself, a blue rinse shadowing her pink for the occasion, my purple-headed beauty, my dear old Dawneroo!"

The bloke's a bleedin' poet, 'e is.

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