Mixed Fiction

THE YOUNG ASSASSINS, by Juan Goytisolo (273 pp.; Knopf; $3.95), describes the half-silly, half-tragic capers of some angry young men who are not sure what they are angry about. Their arena is Madrid. Their indulgent parents are mostly well-to-do and cannot understand why their sons neglect their studies, spend their time with prostitutes and sneer at middle-class comforts. Up to that point, the youngsters described by young (28) Spanish Author Goytisolo have got their kicks from booze, sex and seedy night life. But when Ana, the lone girl in the gang and the only one with a working-class background, suggests the murder of a wealthy politician, they seize on the idea as a chance to prove to each other what they are made of.

None of them has anything in particular against old Francisco Guarner. The book skillfully makes it plain that the crime is planned only because of a variety of character flaws that each youngster more or less recognizes in himself. They are not even on the level with one another. When they play poker to see who will do the actual shooting, the cards are stacked by drunken Eduardo and tough-talking little Luis so that David, the kindest and weakest of the bunch, has to do the dirty work. The deed--getaway car and all--is planned coldly by Agustin, a young painter for whom art is not enough. The crime fails not because his plan is faulty but because David cannot pull the trigger as he faces the easy victim.* The gang splits. Before novel's end, a murder does take place, one almost as pointless as the planned killing would have been.

The book was censored in Spain, and in some ways Author Goytisolo's hot-blooded young assassins are unmistakably Spanish. But there are gangs like the one he describes in just about every large city in the world. The Young Assassins has the virtue of sympathetically describing youth's restlessness in a static society. Its weakness is its failure to dramatize psychological motives, which its author is precocious enough to sense but not mature enough to understand all the way.

MY FELLOW DEVILS, by L. P. Hartley (413 pp.; British Book Centre; $3.95), introduces wealthy, prim and Protestant Margaret Pennefather, who hesitates when glamorous Colum Maclnnes proposes marriage. Not only is he a Roman Catholic but his origins are vague; though he has gone to an approved public school, Nick Burden and other classmates think him rather a bounder. Worse, Colum is a film star who looks like Marlon Brando and plays gangsters and crooks.

Margaret, at 28, has spirit enough to marry Colum even though it means leaving dear old daddy, who has been so dependent on her. At first, Colum is just wonderful to Margaret, but his friends seem a tacky lot. There is Mrs. Belmore, the rich, vulgar American, and beautiful but unladylike Lauriol, who seems to have certain claims on Colum that Margaret does not care to think about. More unsettling is the fact that Colum rapidly proves himself to be an unmitigated liar and a compulsive thief. One of his pranks causes the death of Mrs. Belmore, a nasty brush with the police and the apparent ruin of his film career. Desperate, Margaret tries prayer to St. Anthony and, as a last resort, appeals to Father McBane, one of those all-wise priests so often found in contemporary British fiction.

Father McBane begins the supernatural motif that gathers force in the book's concluding pages and gives subliminal importance to the rather conventional story of an unsuitable marriage. Fun-loving Colum is categorized as a man who not only plays the devil but is the devil, and there are hints of greater enormities than lying and theft. In flight from evil, Margaret saves herself by plunging into Catholicism.

As in his previous books (Eustace and Hilda, The Boat), Anglican Author Hartley, 63, presents his symbolism with a Victorian skill and discursiveness. He is too well bred a writer ever to grip the reader by his lapels. Rather, he seems to stand some distance away from his characters, observing all that happens with the mild apprehension of a passerby who has come upon an accident but who will scurry off if called upon for aid or testimony.

THE FORSAKEN ARMY, by Heinrich Gerlach (383 pp.; Harper; $3.95), is not a good novel and does not have to be. It is simply a crushing book about one of the most crushing of military disasters, the battle of Stalingrad. Theodor Plievier's Stalingrad (TIME, Nov. 1, 1948) long seemed the last word on the grisly subject, but Author Gerlach had the soldier's bad luck and writer's advantage of having fought in the battle himself. He was one of some 6,000 German soldiers (of an army of about 300,000) still alive and in captivity at war's end. As he tells it, he wrote The Forsaken Army when he was a prisoner of the Russians. The Reds took the manuscript, and he underwent a course in hypnosis back home before he could remember his nightmare well enough to set it down again.

His characters have neither depth nor subtlety; they are merely registers of disaster. To the Germans, the Stalingrad pocket was known simply as The Cauldron. Trapped between the Don and the Volga, they first fought heroically in a rotten cause, then for plain survival. At first it never occurred to them that the Fuhrer would not try to save them, as he had promised. Rumor had it that parachute regiments, SS divisions, tank armies would break the Russian cordon. But as the Russians squeezed, The Cauldron contracted. Food gave out, then ammunition, finally hope. Hitler ordered the men at Stalingrad to fight to the last bullet, and so they did, except for those who saved the last bullet for themselves. Comrades fought over bits of horse meat, slices of bread. The dead were no longer buried, wretchedly improvised hospitals became so crowded that the seriously wounded were put out to freeze to death.

There were cowards here and there, but for the most part the men of this elite army had become automatons who squeezed triggers, starved, or were shot down in a state of frozen apathy. When Field Marshal Paulus finally surrendered, it was not so much an act of mercy or defeat as a gesture of dumb inevitability.

Author Gerlach, a onetime schoolmaster, makes the appropriate and expected anti-Hitler comments, but they are not really the heart of the book. The Forsaken Army is a documentary exposure of men in their last extremity, of maddening pressure unrelieved by grace.

*The plot recalls the TV play by Reginald Rose, A Quiet Game oj Cards, which stirred a storm of protests from viewers when it was produced on CBS two weeks ago. In the play a group of bored businessmen decided to murder an innocent, determined in a poker game which one of them was to commit the crime. In the end the would-be murderer found himself unable to commit the crime.

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