Is Sex Necessary?

ITS UGLY HEAD (183 pp.)--Derek Monsey--Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

If news of Derek Monsey's novel reaches the right ears, he will surely be barred for life from the Book-of-the-Month and P.E.N. clubs. His book is didactic, and his thesis--previously embraced by Savonarola, Bowdler and certain 17th century New England pastors, but expounded by no fiction writer within memory--is simple: among the higher primates, sex is nasty.

The book begins safely enough. The narrator, who can be described redundantly as a discontented newspaperman, hates his job. In the process the author (movie critic for London's Sunday Express) pokes some sharp fun at British journalism. But the tip-off that Novelist Monsey finds the world more sickening than funny comes soon: the narrator mentions that his cast-off wife, a stripteaser whose breasts point nor'-nor'east and nor'-nor'west, respectively, achieved her directional distinction through cosmetic surgery. What follows is no more pleasant than a surgeon's knife.

The newspaperman learns that a girl with whom he has been living has casually let herself be sterilized, and that a debutante with whom he would like to play house is all too fertile. He arranges for an abortion, although he is not the deb's undoer. He is caught, stripped and tortured almost to death by the girl's brother and two accomplices, not because of the abortion plans but just for the sadistic hell of it. Eventually he marries the girl, and as the book ends, he is about to divorce her. "The evidence which the various agents have collected is quite straightforward," the narrator relates. "It always is. It's an ugly business."

Novelist Monsey writes very well, but not very convincingly. His sentences, paragraphs and pages are apt and forceful, and for the most part sustain the moods he intends. But taken a chapter or so at a time, the writing wars with itself. The reader may wonder whether the author really means what his narrator says. The newspaperman's powerful, simultaneous attraction and revulsion toward sex has left him torn by disillusion. But his humor betrays him; it is sane and healthy. The grin may be twisted, but the mind is not, and it is hard to believe that once the fellow gets his divorce and has a few drinks to steady himself, he will still be able to see the Devil's jigging hoofs instead of the barmaid's dimpled knees.

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