Introspective Stinker

DANGLING MAN -- Saul Bellow -- Vanguard ($2.50).

Millions of young Americans have been through it -- months of distressing uncertainty, expecting a draft call, finding it was not imminent, hearing that it was, etc. -- until they are finally put out of their misery by induction. But this is the first self-pitying novel about the experience.

Under the stress of pre-induction anguish, the protagonist, a former employe of the Inter-American Travel Bureau, b haves very badly. He quarrels with his well-meaning relatives, insults his friends, lives off his wife because he sees no point in getting a job that can only be tem porary. He also plays around with a trol lop, and whenever he grows too utterly unhappy, goes out walking in the rain, getting his feet wet to spite everybody.

But this silliness conceals a noble heart. In nearly 200 pages of introspection, the dangling young man magnanimously forgives his rather unattractive intellectual friends their faults, even forgives the world for being at war. ("Yes, I shall shoot, I shall take lives ; I shall be shot at, and my life may be taken. Certain blood will be given for half-certain reasons, as in all wars. Somehow I cannot regard it as a wrong against myself.")

The agony of waiting finally becomes too great for him. He writes to his draft board that he would rather be taken than kept waiting. And the draft board obliges.

Dangling Man is a very carefully written book. As the publishers say, it is a sympathetic and understanding study of a young man struggling with his soul. It might be even more sympathetic if Author Bellow (who is not in the Army) ever seemed to suspect that, as an object of pity, his hero is a pharisaical stinker.

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