Mixed Fiction

THE BIG WARD, by Jacoba van Velde (120 pp.; Simon & Schuster; $3), a major literary success in Europe, is an uncommonly honest novel about the ordinary death of an ordinary old woman. In it, Dutch Author Jacoba van Velde manages to skirt the standard literary paths to death--cynicism, hysteria, indifference and bravado. Her setting is an old-women's nursing home, and in it the place to avoid is the big ward. To be moved there from the little ward, which beds only six, is a sure sign that the doctors have sighted the end; to be switched from the big to the little is to be given a reprieve. Mrs. Van der Veen has had a stroke at home, but when she awakes, she is still in the little ward. She is 74. "A good age," the doctor says. But what can be good about it? Her husband is dead. Her only child is married to a poverty-bound painter in Paris. And the nagging pain in her stomach is no mystery to either the doctor or the reader. But though she dreads death, it is the contemplation of life present and past that makes Mrs. Van der Veen touching.

Hers has been the routine existence of a careful housewife, a faithful, even timid mate, a concerned mother. Now, around her in the hospital, she sees too many examples of human ugliness--women near death who can still be petty, cruel, gluttonous and vain. Yet she still has an eye for a youngster at play, for courting pigeons, for flowers. Author van Velde triumphs over her unattractive little world by accepting it for what it is. just as Mrs. Van der Veen, with all her fears, remains a figure of dignity till the end. Without tricks--and without sentimentality--The Big Ward leaves the feeling that it is not about dying but about a life, however commonplace, that has been lived well.

THE CHAPMAN REPORT, by Irving Wallace (371 pp.; Simon & Schuster; $4.50), fills an unfelt need for a peeping tome to set beside Peyton Place. Dr. Chapman is an all but sexless biologist who has extended his studies of the lemur and marmoset to the sex habits of U.S. males and females. With his worshipful male research team, Chapman invades "The Briars," an upper middle-class Los Angeles suburb, to do interviews for A Sex History of the American Married Female. Expectedly, all the watched sexpots in The Briars boil over, either during the interviewing sessions or in uncontrolled experiments. Among the cases: Sarah Goldsmith, a mother of two who is cheating on a tabby-cat husband with a tomcat theater director; Naomi Shields, an alcoholic nymphomaniac who accommodates an entire jazz combo; Teresa Harnish, the arty wife of an art dealer who decides to find out from a Cro-Magnon beach bum how the other half loves. For a change of pace, the heroine is frigid, or thinks she is.

The book turns luridly melo-traumatic when an interviewer commits rape-murder and suicide. The novel begins with the smile of a spoof-expose, contorts to a smirk and very nearly ends as a smutty soap opera badly in need of soap. It is notable largely for the crass calculation with which author and publisher can manufacture an almost certain bestseller, as well as for one of its few serious points, made when Dr. Chapman is denounced as the egocentric charlatan he is: "You speak of love in numbers. Human beings are hardly numbers at all. No numbers can add up devotion, tenderness, trust, pity, sacrifice, intimacy."

MIGUEL STREET, by V. S. Naipaul (222 pp.; Vanguard; $3.95), recalls the fact that, by some twist of mind or diet, the inhabitants of Trinidad speak English in a way that startles and delights the ear. They have this in common with nonprofessional speakers of Irish English (the barroom Irish of Manhattan's Third Avenue are tedious professionals) and with the talkers of Elizabethan England, if their playwrights bear true witness. In writing about such magnificent lingoists, color threatens to overwhelm shape, as it very nearly did in Naipaul's roguish first novel, The Mystic Masseur. In these sketches about Port of Spain, he lets shape find its own way home. This makes it hard to tell just how good a writer he may be, but the color, at least, is brilliant.

Miguel Street's best rhetorician is a broad-sterned woman named Laura, who has had eight children by seven men. "Man, she like Shakespeare when it come to using words," says a man who is inexplicably called Hat. Tenderly, Laura gives her brood the rough side of her tongue: "Alwyn, you broadmouth brute, come here," and "Lorna, you black bowleg bitch, why you can't look what you doing?"

Laura is not the street's only eccentric. There is Big Foot, a solemn and terrifying prankster who expresses his view of an unwashed world by getting a job driving a bus, hauling his passengers five miles beyond the city, and then forcing them to get out and bathe. There is Man-Man, who writes random words in the street, repeating a vowel for several blocks if he likes its looks. Author Naipaul, a native of Trinidad, understands well that his comical characters do not live comic lives, and his best sketches are shaded with compassion. When police drag a much-admired fraud named Bogart off to jail for nonsupport, his friend Hat gives an eloquent explanation of why Bogart had left his wife in a distant village and returned to strut about Miguel Street: "To be a man, among we men." Laura, Bogart. and a few more of Port of Spain's people deserve another look.

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