Character Assassination

THROUGH THE HOOP (351 pp.)--Michel Del Castillo--Knopf ($4.95).

Spanish-born Michel Del Castillo, 30, spent a harrowing childhood in European concentration camps, but was able to recall his experiences calmly and compassionately in a widely praised first novel, Child of Our Time. In his third novel, Del Castillo is more belligerent and less interesting. He now seems bent on taking revenge on all the adults who blighted his childhood in Franco's Spain.

There are enough villains to populate Dante's Inferno: priests, bishops, mothers, fathers, Falangists, high society, low society, expatriates. Del Castillo is a kind of chatty Virgil who takes his readers on a tour of these monsters, pausing before them for ponderous comments like "Oh, the mysteries of life." It is not that the light touch is beyond Del Castillo. A felicitous phrase occasionally escapes him: they had "the habit of sprinkling theft and graft with holy water." It is just that he cannot refrain from constantly clubbing his characters senseless. In a matter of three pages, he manages to accuse a Spanish small businessman of "cynicism," "pharisaism." "obduracy," "unctuousness," "cravenness," "priggishness" and "cruelty." The reader's sympathy mulishly goes out to a fellow so abused by his author.

The only contrast to all the villainy is an ethereal. Christlike character who is of course unjustly martyred. Even in Franco's Spain, there must be something between saints and sinners, someone who is just the least bit human.

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