Harpoons & Screech Owls

ARTURO'S ISLAND (372 pp.) -- Elsa Morante--Knopf ($4.50).

Arturo Gerace. the novel's young hero, is far too introspective, and too giddy, to resemble Huck Finn in any other way, but like the Hannibal rapscallion, he has all the right disadvantages. Arturo lives on the Mediterranean island of Procida, never goes to school or does chores, hardly ever wears underwear or shoes, and has no one to tell him what to do. His mother died in childbirth, and his father, who is independently poor, knocks about most of the time on miscellaneous travels. When the father comes home, the two of them swim and go sailing about the island--there is a fine penitentiary to spy on and brood about. Their ramshackle house was once a monastery; now it is a kind of museum filled with broken harpoons, dried starfish and "at least one pair of screech owls." Sometimes Arturo helps sweep the cigarette butts from around his father's bed into a corner of the bedroom, to be thrown out the window later. That is the extent of the housekeeping.

A peasant boy, Arturo recalls, took care of him until he was several years old, and then his father gave him a fine dog, Immacolatella. But the most remarkable being in the boy's life is the father himself. He is tall, blond and dashing, and his long, mysterious absences from the island only add to his glitter; Arturo imagines him leading a band of pirates, or stalking through the jungle in search of ivory.

Then when Arturo is 14, his Eden becomes a flawed paradise; his father comes home with a bouncing, 16-year-old wife. The boy is jealous, first of the wife, and later of a blond, much fussed-over baby brother. Haughtily, he withdraws into a prolonged adolescent sulk. But sulk and stall as much as he will, he cannot hold on to his boyhood. Unwillingly, he begins to see that his father is no pirate captain, but only a foolish and pathetic wastrel. With the customary awkwardness and anguish (the boy becomes guiltily enamored of his stepmother) Arturo grows to young-manhood and leaves his island.

Author Morante, who is the wife of Novelist Alberto (The Woman of Rome) Moravia, shows no traces in her writing of the anguished eroticism of her husband's work. They live in separate apartments and see each other only occasionally; she composes at night, he works by day. She writes of childhood with humor and compassion, and manages to convince the reader that Arturo's fantastic island is the lonely world each child lives in for a time --and then deserts for the crowded, dreary shore of adulthood.

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