Mixed Fiction

MAN'S DESIRING, by Menno Gallie (192 pp.; Harper; $3.50) is a sort of border ballad about the frontier between England and Wales. Few Americans think of that line as much of a barrier, but to Griff Rowlands, a hymn-singing Welshman from a valley full of coal tips and chapels, it is booby-trapped with social snares and moral menace. At 24, he gets an appointment as assistant lecturer in mathematics at one of the new raw "red brick" universities in the English provinces. Starting writh this subject matter, Menna Gallie's brisk, garrulous and altogether charming novel serves to trace a few more lines on the meticulously mapped social topography of postwar Britain. New to this socially useful labor, Novelist Gallie adds a wonderful Welsh fluency, quite as awesome as the more widely notorious Irish gift of the gab.

Hero Griff (Gryffydd) seems at first blink to be just another Lucky Jim type of intellectual spiv-on-the-make. He even makes faces at himself like his famous prototype and is obsessively concerned with the impression he produces in important people (it is usually unfortunate: he wears his first dinner jacket to a cocktail party). But this novel tells not of successful spivery but of a village innocence doggedly preserved amid fleshpots and sophistries--although the fleshpots are rather lean and the sophistries baffling only to Griff, the simple mathematician. Lydia Kilmartin, Eng. Lit., "smashing figure," is probably the most sophisticated item at Warbeck College; her specialty is getting colleagues' names wrong with comic intent and making outrageous sexual remarks at inappropriate times.

This common type of aggressive intellectual tease is new to Griff, but he is happily prepared to be teased--until she goes too far. In a lecture, "Religion or Eroticism," Lydia indulges in pseudo-Freudian persiflage on all Griff's favorite hymns. "Bloody blasphemous cow," he thinks, and tells her off in strong valley language. It is a compelling story so far--both gay and dismal. But Novelist Gallic will not let Griff welsh on his Welsh-ness : she wants him to win. In the end, the stage seems set for a true marriage of mathematics and letters, in a way the readers can only hope will warm the intercultural cockles of the heart of C. P. Snow.

HERE COMES PETE NOW, by Thomas Anderson (117 pp.; Random House; $3), is the second book by the author of Your Own Beloved Sons (TIME, March 26, 1956), the best of all fictional accounts of the Korean war. Anderson's new novel is set down as firmly as its title, but what it pins to paper is an experience that shades from simple fact into fantasy and compulsion, in much the hallucinatory manner of Franz Kafka.

It all starts in a routine enough way.

The young narrator is simply trying to get a job as a longshoreman on the New York waterfront. But as anyone who has seen the film On the Waterfront knows, when the men jam up at the hiring hall, it is not that simple. The hiring agent may point at Joe or he may give the nod to Frank. Each day the men come back, some hoping for work, some not caring since their mere presence means that they qualify for unemployment insurance.

Some have not had a day's work in years.

Pete is one of the hiring agents, short, brusque, a smoker of foul cigars and an enigma under his greasy brown hat. When he appears, an electric tremor shoots through the hall. Everyone "shapes" for Pete; it becomes a matter of pride to be picked by him. Most of the men know that he never will choose them, yet they jostle to get into the front row of his section, and even the oldtimers grow rigid with respect and intimidation when someone calls out: "Here comes Pete now." To the young hero narrator it becomes a matter of the first importance to be given the nod by Pete. Why? Is it that Pete picks only the best, separates the men from the boys? Or is he a "father image," a stand-in for a rough guy's notion of God? The narrator hardly knows and finally hardly cares. He cannot face Pete even when he bulls his way down to the first row. At book's end it is hard to tell whether he really wants to be hired or not. Like the men in Godot he is waiting.

The important thing is for Pete to see him, know he is there, provide the mysterious contact that is more important than work itself or any fact of life on the "outside." Here Comes Pete Now will strike many readers as evasive and maddeningly inconclusive. It is neither. It is, instead, deliberately groping. Just what the book, its hero--or man--gropes for is never made clear, but that is precisely the author's point.

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