Oliver Copperfield in Italy

A LAST LAMP BURNING by Gwyn Griffin. 512 pages. Putnam. $6.95.

Horace admired the bay. Virgil composed his Georgics and chose to be buried there. "I pardon all," wrote Goethe, "who have lost their minds in Naples." Readers will pardon British Novelist Gwyn Griffin (A Significant Experience), who clearly lost his mind in Naples, and has here written a vast, violent novel that commandingly redeems his mania.

The story's hero, 16-year-old Gennaro, is named for the city's patron, San Gennaro, whose clotted, vial-encased blood, according to tradition, miraculously bubbles three times each year. Gennaro's blood bubbles daily. The ebullient bastard child of a peasant mother and soldier father, he divides his zealous energies between caring for his impoverished, half-paralyzed Chinese grandfather and carrying on grandfather's moribund undertaking establishment.

Handyman & Thief. Gennaro is coffinmaker, wreathmaker, funeral-insurance salesman, handyman, business manager, and hearse driver. He is also poor, and in Naples that means powerless. Caught without a chauffeur's license, he is slapped with a staggering fine and forbidden to drive. In debt for tobacco, rent, and worst of all, for coffin lumber, he limps through one hand-mangling day heaving shovelfuls of earth for a huge industrial corporation--and gets fired for incompetence. Employed in a sizzling restaurant kitchen, he is falsely accused of theft, gets fired again.

Only his undertaking business guarantees Gennaro a measure of self-respect. To save it, he turns into a thief and hijacks the contents of a warehouse, but is interrogated and tortured by the police. At last the business collapses; dying old man and desperate young boy are turned out of their tumble-down tenement; Gennaro is stripped of everything--except his roaring Neapolitan zest for life.

Plots & Gloats. Author Griffin prints his story on a huge and variegated back cloth as complex as the ancient, untidy city that it portrays. It recounts history, both ancient and modern, and includes a decayed family of vulpine, voracious aristocrats who are scram bling madly for possession of a disputed inheritance; an oily industrialist who is patiently plotting to marry his fatuous daughter to the family's weak-minded young heir; a bumbling, gentle pedant who is complacently gloating over a fortune to which he does not yet have legal title, and as lusty a collection of blackmailers, murderers, police inspectors, political agitators and petty shopkeepers as are likely to appear outside the pages of Dickens. Like Dickens, Griffin leans rather too heavily on coincidence and the happy accident. He delights in detailing riots, violent death and upheavals of nature. But the trick effects chime neatly enough with the milieu. The result is thundering good Neapolitan drama.

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