Portrait of a Heel

ACROBAT ADMITS (284 pp.)--Alfred Grossman--Braziller ($3.50).

Stephanie knows him as Hugo. To Cairo Joy, his other girl, he is Willard. By any other name he would still be a heel. He sleeps regularly with Stephanie, a lovely Viennese with a face scarred during the London blitz. He sleeps once with Cairo

Joy. a prize he wins after proposing to her and being accepted. New York pleases him because he can be irresponsible and keep two identities. He really works for a trade magazine with offices on Madison Avenue, but he convinces his fiancee's respectable family that he is on a supersecret Government mission. Still, he is forced to admit to himself that his double life is vapid: "Nothing is wrong with my days, but they are pallid and dull me ... I am not undernourished but I am fed up."

Author Grossman is managing editor of East Europe, a serious magazine published by the Free Europe Committee, but in this first novel he is also a cynical commentator on the U.S. scene. He is obviously convinced that there is something hollow at the core of American life. Willard-Hugo can be devastating as he describes a suburban party given by Cairo Joy's married sister. He raises hob with giveaway shows, the pornographic-picture trade along Times Square, the shallow mind of little Miss Average whose only coup in life is the landing of a husband. But he is a failure at suggesting what he wants, and Author Grossman also dodges the novelist's toughest question: How did he get that way?

The emptiness really lies at the core of Willard's character. When he finds that he is in love with Stephanie, he avoids the responsibility that love requires by taking refuge in jealousy and smashing the affair. In the end he tries to murder the man with whom he suspects Stephanie of cheating, but it is an innocent boy who becomes the victim of his senseless attack. The trouble is that Author Grossman's hero is more ridiculous than his victims, and the social vices he flays seem almost attractive compared to the empty reaches of his own sick soul. But Grossman, in spite of long stretches of overwriting and more than a trace of downright vulgarity, clearly has talent, wit and a savage satirical bite.

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