Mixed Fiction

GOOD BYE, AVA, by Richard Bissell (241 pp.; Atlantic-Little, Brown; $3.95), recalls the widespread complaint that the U.S. lacks comic novelists. This is not true, as is proved weekly by the bestseller lists; the great lack is of novelists who are funny on purpose. In that lodge two of the more notable members are Peter De Vries (The Tents of Wickedness) and Richard Bissell (7 1/2 Cents).

Bissell, in High Water and A Stretch on the River, has libeled the Mississippi more amusingly than anyone since Mark Twain, and Blue Rock, Iowa, the scene of his latest foolishness, is a river town. His hero is a happy bachelor named Frank Blanchard, who, though college-educated, wouldn't take New York if you renamed Sixth Avenue for him. And for good reason: he lives on a houseboat, makes a dandy income manufacturing Sno-Fuzz machines (Sno-Fuzz is a kiddy confection), and practices a kind of Greco-Roman wrestling with any number of ladies. In fallow periods he daydreams of Ava Gardner--a whimsy not among the author's bubbliest.

There is just enough plot--a fertilizer company threatens to evict Frank and another houseboat owner from their moorings--to string together the sort of dialogue in which Bissell slyly captures the murmur of the heartland. But at book's end--after Frank has married a girl with the greatest body in the Illinois River valley from Grafton clear to Joliet--it is clear that Author Bissell simply has not tried very hard.

At his best, Bissell has the curious ability to affect his fans like four beers on a hot afternoon, and to chill his de tractors like four draughts of anti-beer, a potion (mercifully still to be invented) that leaves a man progressively soberer and meaner. Good Bye, Ava is not exactly anti-beer; it is simply a little flat.

ROBE OF HONOUR, by Alexander Cordell (384 pp.; Doubleday; $4.50), is a costume romance, and usually such books have almost no resemblance to legitimate novels. Ordinarily it is possible to judge each sort according to its own standards: Do broadswords and bustlines glitter sufficiently in the one, are reality's fore and backside faithfully drawn in the other? But now and then a writer with the skill of a Robert Graves succeeds in mixing the two styles. Author Cordell once again attempts the trick with some fairly entertaining results, but he is no Graves.

Welsh unrest during the 19th century provides the background for Cordell's romance novels, which relate the doings and stewings of a wild country clan called the Mortymers. The present book, sequel to The Rape of the Fair Country, moves the Mortymers to the coal-mining and farming town of Carmarthen in time for the Rebecca riots of 1839-44. Strapping young Jethro, the book's hero, joins the night-riding Rebeccas--angry farmers who black their faces and wear their wives' nightgowns to raid the hated tollgates, which devour profits on produce taken to market.-

The author, an English-born Welshman, writes well of two boys poaching rabbits with a ferret and a terrier, of women clacking 18 to the dozen after church, of the deaths of children and grandmothers in the choking mines. He also gives a good picture of a night raid on a tollgate, but does not trouble himself to explain the social chaos that led to the building of the gates.

His prose is Welsh; he can be language-drunk or sly with bawdry, as Dylan Thomas was when he named the village in Under Milk Wood "Llareggub." As for the roarious Jethro, he is engaging as a boy, but loses credibility as he grows older; he is forever lapsing into derring-do, despite the derring-don'ts of his womenfolk. At the end, he escapes a platoon of dragoons and a mine cave-in, and boards ship for the U.S. Cordell can be counted on to tell more of this lad, who will arrive in the New World in good time for Harpers Ferry and Bleeding Kansas.

*The name comes from the Bible: "And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, 'Thou art our sister; be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them.'

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