An Authentic Quixote

NORMAN'S LETTER by Gavin Lambert. 232 pages. Coward-McCann. $5.50.

Biology says that the longer the nurturing period, the higher the species of animal. The quirks in that idea appeal to British-born Novelist Gavin Lambert. He first explored protracted puberty among starlets in Inside Daisy Clover, a barbed novel that Hollywood made into a mushy movie. Now Lambert satirizes the upper-class British male, alternately pampered and scourged in nursery and public school. His hero, Sir Norman Lightwood, is the invincible innocent, a descendant of Paul Pennyfeather who goes unarmed in a world of "pimps and pitiless roughnecks."

Norman's wealthy mama smothered his emotions one cold night when he was ten by taking him into bed with her to explain the facts of life, including the detail that he is the child of her one great love, his Uncle Maurice. Too cowed by these revelations to care much for sex with either sex, too shocked by adultery to become an adult himself, he cowers at her country estate writing mystical verse. Mama runs off with Uncle Maurice to Australia, and Norman is thrown out in "the cold, frowzy, unseasoned city ether" to begin a series of misadventures while trying to live the life of his perfervid daydreams.

Norman is an inviting patsy. "I sign check after check," he says, to "achieve a nirvana in which I don't have to look at anything I don't wish to." Con men and con women bilk him of a fortune and enclose his spirit brick by brick behind a wall of paranoia. A male model and his wife, whom he hires to smooth his way in New York, take off with his new car and a year's advance pay. Norman buys a mountainside in New Mexico, only to have a soulful Indian talk him into paying dearly for another thousand acres and a herd of Angora goats for the production of "Capricorn semisoft cheese," which goes sour before it can be sold. He is finally carted off to a Texas retreat for the mildly deranged. He might have written his poems in peace here, but mama, newly widowed, reappears to lead him off to a last encounter--with the only blond man in a town full of Mexicans. The man robs and kills Norman--a fitting nonheroic end for an unfitted non-hero.

To an Arab boy, the only one who never took advantage of him, Norman wrote the book's theme: "The romantic and the sinister are always intertwined in an attitude somewhere between a struggle and an embrace." By intertwining them, Lambert has achieved an authentic tragicomedy about an authentic 20th century Quixote.

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