Mixed Fiction

THE ART OF LLEWELLYN JONES, by Paul Hyde Banner (372 pp.; Scribner; $4.50), brings back the amateurish but pleasantly diverting ex-diplomat who specializes in novels (S.P.Q.R., Excelsior!) about the kind of foreign affairs that set ambassadorial medals ajingle. The latest hero to pop out of Author Bonner's undiplomatic pouch is Townsend Britton, who is on the mossy side of 50; he is tall, athletic and handsome, but his soul bears the thumbprint of his ruthless wife Edith. She forces him to resign as U.S. Ambassador to Belgium because she wants to be a Washington hostess. Eventually, Britton decides that he, too, can be ruthless, and in fact, Edithless. Boldly following the urge that is the 27-year itch of many a marriage, he deposits $320,000 with discreet Swiss bankers, shaves off his mustache and his Harvard accent and, as plain old Llewellyn Jones, decamps.

He goes only as far as Cincinnati, but there he is at last free to foliate as he pleases--and peeping through the foliage is a ripe young secretary. But the most surprising development of this renaissance is artistic. A lifelong doodler, the AWOL diplomat tries a little weekend sketching and (here we Gauguin!) is startled to find that he is an artist of astonishing power--a Rubens, perhaps, with a touch of Renoir. Within a year he is in Paris, painting his broad-hipped housemaid by day, panting for her by night. But the late-blooming bohemian's idyl is broken by Edith, who shows up to buy a painting and promptly recognizes the lamster. Will he turn worm and let himself be stuffed back into a boiled shirt? Not, the reader can bet his burnt sienna, until expatriate geniuses drink Pepsi-Cola instead of Pernod. For wives, the moral is clear: if a husband begins to doodle, draw your own conclusions.

MAGGIE CASSIDY, by Jack Kerouac (189 pp.; Avon; 50-c-), is a sequel to Doctor Sax (TIME, May 18), the beat Boccaccio's exuberant salute to boyhood. It follows Jack Duluoz and his roughneck buddies from the time they pass puberty (timidly, as if it were a haunted house at midnight) beyond the point at which Duluoz leaves Lowell, Mass., as Kerouac did, to play football for Columbia. Both books are written in the author's customary form, which is to say, utter formlessness. But while the disjointed episodes of Doctor Sax added up--after a number of sizable subtractions--to a vivid picture of mill-town childhood, the gush of recollection in Maggie Cassidy soon becomes just one undammed thing after another.

Duluoz rambles the streets of Lowell, stars in a track meet, eats, sleeps, walks home three miles after holding hands with his girl Maggie (as far as sex goes, the book is innocent enough to be read by a bishop, or a postmaster general). Everything is lengthily reported, but none of it matters much. Perhaps the trouble is that young Duluoz does not matter. As a brash, noisemaking ten-year-old, he lived in a world full of wonders; as a teenager, he seems gross and unimaginative. Maggie Cassidy was taken, like most of Kerouac's recently published books, from an apparently limitless attic filled before On the Road appeared. For the literary taxidermist, such finds can be profitable. "In the bleak, birds squeak," the Beat One interjects during a soliloquy. This specimen, with its weird vein of Gertrude Stein, should be stuffed, mounted, labeled, and sent to the Smithsonian Institution.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.