Mixed Fiction

THE HORIZONTAL HOUR, by Robert W. Marks (346 pp.; David McKay: $4.50), is a psychoanalytic lynching bee in which the patients pack their analyst off to a booby hatch. Suave, self-possessed Kurt Bucholz is a Svengali of the psyche. In engaging Mitteleuropa accents, he collects $75,000 a year from couch-prone Manhattanites, including a self-analytical writer who can scarcely bring himself to write, two husband-and-wife teams in which the hubbies are sexually liverish and the wives feverish (one wife has Bucholzian reveries in which she hears the analyst saying: "What most people don't realize is that the emotional center of the body is the armpit"): a sadomasochistic alcoholic who looks like a Botticelli Venus.

When he grows weary of mental strife, Psychoanalyst Bucholz rushes to the piano and plays a little Beethoven to revive himself (recalling Jules Verne's Captain Nemo and his sessions at the piano-organ). First sign that Bucholz' psychological keyboard is ajangle comes when he forces the Botticelli girl to peel off her clothes and ogles the welts a belt-wielding matron-companion has left on her body. Before the reader can say Marquis de Sade, the Botticelli girl becomes Mrs. Bucholz, and the doctor begins having delusions that his strange wife is tampering with his typewriter, phonograph and radio, and planting hidden microphones in his office. Finally the analyst is forced to turn in his couch for a padded cell.

Novelist Marks, a free-lance author and lecturer, writes crudely and tastelessly. Yet he has captured some of the weird quicksand world of analysis in which white may be white but just as easily may be black, and in which, as Psychoanalyst Theodor (Listening with the Third Ear) Reik once put it, "We do not live but are lived [by] unknown powers within ourselves." And the disintegration of the all-wise, all-knowing analyst has its chilling moments. The spectacle of the mad leading the mad is bound to rivet any modern reader who knows the fearsome reliance a patient places on his analyst.

309 EAST & A NIGHT OF LEVITATION, by Bianca VanOrden (125 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $2.95), is a first book consisting of only two stories, but it has rare style, personal flair and finish, 309 East has an out-of-the-world quality that is firmly rooted in the world as it is. One of the story's three characters is N. Kanduflis, a rich rug merchant, who knows only appetites and inner insecurity. His business handsomely feeds his avarice, his money satisfies his gluttony, his beautiful wife caters to his erotic hungers. When he hires Georgi, a clever, unemployed Manhattanite on the town, he seeks his friendship and tries to turn him into a kind of Peeping Tom to watch his wife. Georgi knows a sick impulse when he sees one, but he plays along. The result is an ingeniously disguised murder. In a windup that is loaded with irony, the two survivors of the triangle, equipped with nothing more than greed and resentment, learn that even successful revenge and a loaded bank account are no substitute for plain character.

The pathetic little heroine of A Night of Levitation is a teen-ager who has fallen in love with a boarding-school teacher. Having been sent to an island resort to get over her infatuation, she promptly falls for a crude, shrewd young local fisherman. After a stolen hour of duel-like talk and romance by the sea, he simply lifts the money in her purse and disappears, leaving a note that reads:

"Goodbye little Miss Finishing School Tuition. . . . $50"

In these top-notch stories, Author VanOrden can lay out an extraordinary writer's poker hand because she holds most of the good cards: sharp insights, a playwright's knack for setting a scene, fundamental sympathy and writing that never wastes its breath.

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