Bestseller Revisited

By Martha Duffy

QB VII by Leon Uris. 504 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

The Jews who have survived pogroms and genocide will doubtless weather this vulgar affront as well. Still, individual Jews who find themselves stuck in Leon Uris' paper detention camp must surely regard QB Vll as a rather gratuitous endurance test.

Based on a libel suit that the author actually faced in England over a sentence in his third novel, Exodus, the book pits a Gentile Polish doctor, Adam Kelno, against a famous American Jewish novelist, Abe Cady. During World War II Dr. Kelno was forced to practice medicine in the infamous Jadwiga concentration camp. He sues Cady for libel because of a sentence that strayed into Cady's blockbuster novel, The Holocaust, which casually charges Kelno with performing "15,000 or more experimental operations without use of anesthesia." The surgery involved sterilization and mutilation of sexual organs. After setting up these pasteboard people, Uris embarks on a lengthy trial scene in which the grizzly camp testimony unfolds.

Many of QB VII's sins are standard for the genre. The prose is an illiterate shorthand: "Lou was a tall, thin man with a sleepy face whose dominating feature was seventy Sy Devore suits." The plot is interstitched with editorials, sermons and lessons in writing. On the latter subject one can hardly deny Uris his soapbox. He has always been a crude novelist. Yet Exodus is the sixth biggest bestselling novel of the century,* and QB VII, after wintering comfortably atop all the charts, is now second only to Exodus in the author's hardback sales.

Sadomasochism. Still Uris' fictional caveats--rung in through Abe's conversations with his British publisher --seem absurdly at odds with his own wretched writing performance this time out. According to Uris, what most writers apparently forget is basic storytelling --a skill he himself once practiced but has neglected in this heavily predictable tale. Then there is that literary creation Author Abe himself, a mensh who makes Hemingway seem as mousy as Mann. Writing is heavy going for Abe. He throws himself into each book with such desperate energy that he is often "unable to lace his shoes" at the end of a day's work.

Abe emerges, finally, as the shining avenger of Jewish wrongs, despite the fact that he is technically guilty of libel since the number of Kelno's crimes did not approach 15,000 and Abe, who cannot recall the doctor at all when charged, does not even know how that pesky sentence got into his book in the first place.

The result of Abe's fecklessness is a roundup of Kelno's victims, who must come to London to relive their tortures in court. Understandably, Abe does not even want to see them, but his son reassures him. "The minute you meet them, you'll forget about their mutilation," he cries. Abe does pull himself together, so much so that each victim goes away with an autographed copy of his complete works. In the meantime, their testimony has accounted for pages and pages of excruciatingly detailed descriptions of sexual organs and agony. In reality it is the documentation of an atrocity, but in slapdash fiction it is only sadomasochism. Which is a popular theme in popular novels these days.

Martha Duffy

* After Peyton Place, God's Little Acre, Gone With the Wind, Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Carpetbaggers. Love Story will probably surpass them all.

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