Getting and Spending

By Paul Gray

THE CONNOISSEUR by EVANS CONNELUR. 197 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

A Manhattan insurance executive named Muhlbach is scouting a rival's New Mexico operations. His object is corporate merger, but Muhlbach finds his own independence endangered. In a Taos curio shop, he is transfixed by a terra cotta nobleman. His soft, Prufrockian sensibility struggles briefly to understand the figurine's power. "Does he remind me of myself?" Muhlbach wonders incongruously. No matter. He pays $30 for it and takes the piece to an expert in Albuquerque. The verdict is quick: authentic Mayan, a dark survivor from pre-Columbian burial rites. By the time his plane touches down in New York, Muhlbach is possessed by his possession.

With declarative simplicity, The Connoisseur traces Muhlbach's plunge into a world where everyone is "into" some sort of object: wicker baskets, pre-Columbian bowls, Oriental sculptures, early American leg irons. His new acquaintances are sharks, nuzzling through dealers' galleries, circling fiercely at auctions. With cold passion, they study the artifacts of vanquished people; blankly, they watch for signs of ignorance or weakness in competitors, especially newcomers like Muhlbach. Having acquired a little knowledge, he quickly obliges them. He successfully bids on what he takes to be an Olmec jade mask, realizing only as the hammer falls that none of the authentic dealers had been nibbling.

Pangs of Greed. This small novel leaves Muhlbach dangling between pleasure and despair. Packed with pre-Columbian arcana (Connell himself is a collector), it conveys the joyous release that absorption in a stern hobby can bring. Something alien has penetrated Muhlbach's life and opened vistas he can never exhaust. Not certain whether his response is to beauty or authenticity, Muhlbach nonetheless responds. Yet he is aware of some disquieting side effects: increasing pangs of greed for what he can appreciate but not afford, a habit of judging people by their acquisitions --and of being judged and found wanting in return. Muhlbach knows that his addiction lends moral support to a rapacious modern traffic in antiquities; operating on his behalf, grave robbers and smugglers struggle to finish the dispersal of pre-Columbian civilizations begun by the Spanish five centuries ago.

In the past, Connell has explored --and refined--two different kinds of narratives. Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969) spun out a series of vignettes in the Midwestern lives of their protagonists; the accretions were devastating catalogues of anomie. In Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel (1963) and Points for a Compass Rose (1973), Connell shored fragments of history and reflection against our ruin, casting them in prose lines that rang with poetry.

The Connoisseur is both more conventional and less informative than its predecessors; in it, Connell has emphasized clarity at the expense of resonance.

But to hold hun to his own standard is to tell the negative half of the story. Connell's style is a model of economy; it reveals the care of an artisan whose works should be collected. -PauI Gray

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