Spring Cleaning

GERONIMO REX by Barry Hannah. 337 pages. Viking. $7.95.

Like many novels about growing up absurd, Geronimo Rex is both a romantic retreat and a sharp, satirical attack on convention. It is the story of young Harriman Monroe, who lives in Dream of Pines, La., a little bit of Southern heaven stripped of its timber by a few paper companies. It is a place where old mules and dogs can park themselves in a House Beautiful driveway to die, and where the black principal of a segregated school turns out the greatest high school marching band in the nation. At 22 Harriman is a seasoned eccentric--ex-trumpet prodigy, pistol-packing fantasist and medical-school dropout. He has also grown obsessed with the legend of Geronimo, the Apache warrior who lived by his own laws. By the time Hannah's rascally hero moves on from Elvis Presley to the murder of Medgar Evers, he has gone the route from private inrage to public outrage. It is not easy to write a regional novel in a homogenizing world. Barry Hannah, 29, has managed it the first time out by combining his special place, the American South of the 1960s, with the mood of paranoia that took root during that violent decade.

THE GODFATHER PAPERS AND OTHER CONFESSIONS by Mario Puzo. 252 pages. Putnam. $6.95.

The author has much to say about writing, readers and himself, quite apart from 38 pages devoted to creating The Godfather (in words and pictures) and growing rich. "The only thing was," he confesses, "I felt very unnatural being out of debt." The Godfather was written entirely from research. It was only afterward, Puzo reports with appropriate delicacy, that "I was introduced to a few gentlemen related to the material. They refused to believe that I had never had the confidence of a don. But all of them loved the book."

NOT TO DISTURB by Muriel Spark. 121 pages. Viking. $5.

In the past, through sheer brains and talent, Scottish Novelist Muriel Spark has got away with pretty much anything she wanted to--ghosts, angels, a devil selling tape recorders to African witch doctors, a London mock Eden for young ladies, some of whom were immolated for lusting after a Schiaparelli dress. But what we have here is a grim little all-purpose parody and microcosm--with resonances that echo in all directions but never quite ring true.

The scene is a chateau near Geneva, once as orderly "as the solar system" but now reduced to greedy chaos. Several generations of servants have helped arrange for the death of their corrupt master and mistress, and confidently await that event, having sold TV, film and serial rights to their stories of murder and suicide in advance. The heir to the chateau, a demented satyr, is brought down from the attic. A doddering churchman arrives by bicycle, and urges sex-depressant pills on everyone. The tragedy occurs on schedule, but not before an odd young couple are blasted by a bolt of lightning during a gothic thunderstorm. For Catholic Convert Spark, that bolt of lightning possibly offers a therapeutic show of power. Religion reduced to "It's not the thing to do." Morality fallen to "doing your own thing." The id escaped from the attic. Publicity, inertia, lust, cosmic disorder. All these could be fruitful enough fables for our times. Trouble is, the goings on are so fictionally pinched, arch and skeletal that the reader is not inclined to read, let alone grope for fretful ambiguities. This time Author Spark is a girl of slender means.

DON JUAN'S BAR by Antonio Callado. 271 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

This funny, cynical, seductive Brazilian novel is virtually a textbook on how not to run a revolution. The many characters are mostly Rio radicals --"the bohemian circle, the theater and movie crowd, the festive left"--who hang out at Don Juan's. Guided fitfully by Cuban contacts, a whole pack decides to join Commandante Che in Bolivia. Some have endured police torture; some have stockpiled guns; one has robbed a few banks. "The fate of this continent depends on us," says Joao the poet, "and here we are sopping up the booze." Many die abruptly of their own recklessness; none of them make it across the Paraguai River. Callado, a Rio journalist who has been in and out of jail himself, is jaunty and offhanded with his story, his level eye trained on his countrymen and their dreamy, crazy ways. If he is saying anything, it is that the revolutionary impulse often leads to a most unsuitable quest for personal fulfillment, and the acts it engenders are the stuff of satire, not war.

CAPE OF STORMS by John Gordon Davis. 519 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

This flawed but highly kinetic second novel by South African Author John Gordon Davis is written in a style that, alas, sometimes suggests Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. Most of the time its setting is a modern Antarctic whaling fleet, English owned but largely manned by Cape Town whites and "Coloureds." The cruelty and comradeship of their gory, race-haunted, frozen shipboard world is conveyed by Davis with extraordinary energy, clarity and even humor. His empathetic descriptions of harpooned whales struggling to escape would turn Ahab himself into a protector of endangered species.

Unhappily, the action eventually moves ashore to follow the trials of a shadowed love affair between a South African officer and a girl who looks as white as Queen Elizabeth but turns out to possess one-eighth Negro blood.

IN THE REIGN OF PEACE by Hugh Nissenson. 157 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.95.

In mood and content these stories, written by an American who has lived in Israel, are linked with the disenchanted fiction and journalism now coming out of that country. As well as anyone, Nissenson depicts the paradox of a promised land immersed in fighting and uneasy compromise. The stories take place from 1946 to the Six-Day War. Spies and interrogators are always close by; families who did not lose someone early in the struggle are sure to later on. The words of Isaiah, invoked by the old, whistle past young men's ears like bullets: "No lion shall be there nor any ravenous beast; but the redeemed shall walk there." Yet to survive, it is hard to be anything but a lion. In Going Up, a retired worker visits his nephews on a kibbutz near Syria and is appalled by the deaths, both Arab and Jewish. He recalls the psalm, "He who keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep," and mutters, "it wouldn't be so bad if I believed He was asleep." Though occasionally marred by a pat coda, these stories are laconic and wise. Their silences refresh the ear. as their unabashed moral searching refreshes the mind.

THE ROSE GARDEN by Otto Friedrich. 78 pages. Lippincott. $3.95.

Anyone who feels that books about raising roses are customarily too mulch of a mulchness should try this one. The author takes his roses seriously enough, but frequently uses them as an excuse for provocative digressions about caterpillars, stones and the fact that his father, now deaf, often pretends to hear, especially when showing people around his rose garden. While discussing such things as exotic rose names and pointing out that some roses don't smell very good ("sweet and rather tawdry," he describes one unfortunate species), Friedrich never assumes that the care and feeding of roses must be either a sweaty or a holy subject. Especially recommended for those who cannot tell a Strawberry Blonde from a creeping President Herbert Hoover.

END ZONE by Don DeLillo. 242 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $5.95.

The gear, mechanics and incantations of American football would challenge a Claude Levi-Strauss. Confronting them as a novelist, Don DeLillo shows a touch of the structuralist anthropologist too. End Zone is a cool, plotless, witty novel of football as technology and necessary ritual. DeLillo's college players study subjects like Mexican geography and airport commissary management, but their literary roots are more familiar. Gary, running back and hero-narrator, is the perennial exile who takes his talents from college to college --along with a guilty fascination for the hypothesis of nuclear disaster. A Jewish lineman named Bloomberg is a kind of living Diaspora whose traditions have diffused to a standstill. A stout girl named Myna acts as a contemporary wisdom goddess who counsels balancing history with science fiction.

It isn't so much that these characters are bigger than life. DeLillo's overly schematic vision of life is too small for them.

THE MIDNIGHT RAYMOND CHANDLER. 734 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $10.

The helpless Raymond Chandler fan has trouble staying away from the Cs on any paperback mystery shelf. He tests every anthology to see if some scraplet of Chandler's small output will turn up. This volume rewards with an immaculate early story, Red Wind, and punishes with a dreadful late effort called The Pencil. Also included are two famous novellas, Trouble Is My Business and Blackmailers Don't Shoot, and two full novels, The Little Sister and The Long Goodbye. The difference between the two novels reveals an uncomfortable truth. The Little Sister is vintage Chandler. The plot is ingenious and preposterously complicated. Detective Philip Marlowe is full of tough backchat ("Cracking wise," he would call it). In The Long Goodbye, the paranoia and self-pity that engulfed Chandler in his last long work, Playback, are already in evidence, and the prose and characterization are flaccid. Still, this is a rich enough sampling to send any true fan back to the Cs for the other five novels.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ARCHDRUID by John McPhee. 245 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

David Brower, the wild-haired druid, ecologist and outdoorsman who guided the Sierra Club during its rise to national prominence as a scourge of dam builders and redwood cutters, is the subject. The glitter in such a man's eyes can make it difficult to get a clear look at him, but McPhee had the happy notion of confronting Brower with three of his ideological enemies on threatened terrain--Glacier Peak Wilderness in the state of Washington, Georgia's Cumberland Island and finally, on a raft trip down the Colorado River. In the process Brower and his antagonists are revealed as subtly and convincingly as they would be in a good novel. The book settles nothing, but it shows clearly where some of the fault lines lie in the environmental impasse.

NUNAGA: TEN YEARS OF ESKIMO LIFE by Duncan Pryde. 285 pages. Walker. $7.95.

For Eskimo portraits, pure and sometimes lovingly comic, readers still have to resort to Gontran De Poncins' classic Kabloona (1941). But this memoir by a young Scotsman, who escaped

Glasgow in the late 1950s to work for the Hudson's Bay Company above the Arctic Circle, has its moments of old-style adventure and anthropological insight. The author is brisk, precise, modest as he tells about fighting with mean Eskimos, cajoling lazy Eskimos, foiling marriage-minded Eskimos and learning how to carve an igloo with a snow knife. Eskimos, it appears, have 33 distinct words to describe snow in various conditions from soft to firmish, "but not quite firm enough to build a snow-house." There is only one Eskimo word for all the 150 different kinds of flowers that briefly bloom in the Arctic.

THE KID by John Seelye. 119 pages.

Viking. $4.95.

In his first book, The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (TIME, March 2, 1970), John Seelye rewrote Mark Twain as an answer to nearly a century of carping critics. In The Kid, he makes American folklore and literary archetypes jump through hoops, in obvious appreciation of Leslie Fiedler's remark that "to understand the West as somehow a joke comes a little closer to getting it straight."

In 1887 a frail, blond, blue-eyed kid rides into the Wyoming town of Fort Besterman, accompanied by a huge deaf-and-dumb Negro named Ham, with lightning fists and an eye that can see through the backs of playing cards. The inseparable pair has gold for buying sheep, but there are those down at the saloon who would like to shear them of their capital. The result is a series of confidence games, mayhems, range justice, mob rule and a litter of corpses, including Ham and the Kid.

A fine mock western for sure. But also a lode for those critical triflehounds who seem fated by instinct to sniff out literary sources. One could begin with the Old Testament (Ham as father of the Egyptians; the Kid as Joseph the shepherd and favored of pharaoh), then move on through Melville's Ishmael and Queequeg, Mark Twain's Huck and Nigger Jim. Considering that the Kid eventually turns out to be a girl, maybe Seelye owes something to King Kong (Fay Wray and that adoring friend).

TO SMITHEREENS by Rosalyn Drexler. 187 pages. New American Library. $5.95.

No, a smithereen is not a male smither. In this, as in Rosalyn Drexler's earlier novels, there is a joyful unfocusing of gender and role as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau. The author is one of the lucky ones who has successfully recognized her various talents--as a sculptor, an abstract painter, a playwright and novelist. For a few months in 1951, when she was 24, Mrs. Drexler also toured the U.S. as Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire, a professional wrestler. To Smithereens borrows from those wrestling days to the extent that the hefty heroine, Rosa Rubinsky, grunts and groans in the ring as Rosa

Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire. On a less strenuous plane, the book is the bizarrely sweet love story of Rosa and Paul Partch, an art critic who introduces himself by groping Rosa's massive thigh in a movie theater. Still, the author's characters are never truly grotesque because in her mothering embrace they somehow remain forever innocent.

CAR by Harry Crews. 152 pages. Morrow. $5.95.

Car is, yes, a savage fantasy about America's true national pastime: consuming. What better tidbit to satisfy real and imagined cravings than an automobile? For reasons that run from visceral to metaphysical, Herman (son of Easy Mack, automotive history's equivalent of the village blacksmith) decides to eat a car from bumper to bumper. The vehicle chosen is a Ford Maverick, "straight stick shift and no options." It is cut and melted down into bite-size pieces, which Herman plans to swallow at the rate of half a pound a day.

The ritual which Author Crews pursues with antic religious zeal takes place daily before huge paying crowds. The feat encounters numerous disruptions, allowing Crews to freight his gag with optional seriocomic accessories. Preeminent is a sort of reversible cannibalism, presumably based on the proposition that you are what you eat, but also eat what you are.

PAULINE'S by Pauline Tabor. 295 pages. Touchstone. $9.95.

She started off in the Depression in Bowling Green, Ky., divorced and broke with two kids to feed. It might have been what they used to call the old story--a life of sin and degradation. But Pauline Tabor was smart enough to open up a house of her own. "Pauline's" became a Kentucky institution --politicians went to pleasure themselves there; fraternity boys would beg a pair of panties to take back as campus trophies. More than three decades later, Pauline, married to a successful bookie, retired to a farm to raise organic crops and write her memoirs.

They are a raunchily genteel exercise--Belle Watling as Jane Austen. This is Pauline commenting on the doomed marriage of one of her girls to a "trick": "Ghosts of past lovers soon blot out the fragile spark of passion, leaving only bitter ashes on love's hearthstone." A 250-lb. termagant who served on occasion as her own bouncer, Pauline can also be and talk, as she might say, rough as a cob. Not surprisingly, she turns out to be a moralist. Pornography shocks her. So does wife swapping. Homosexuals are "lovey-dovey gay boys" and feminists are YLib loonies." A harried husband, she says, "should stand up and clout the Old Lady a couple of times just to let her know he's still boss." Pauline was the John Wayne of madams, with an admixture of Mae West. Like her book, she was a splendid period piece.

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