Mixed Fiction

TRIAL, by Don Mankiewicz (306 pp.; Harper; $3.50), is the $10,000 winner of the Harper Prize Novel Contest, but the ribbon it really earns is a piece of black crape. The book is a flaccid throwback to the I-never-had-a-chance school of social protest popular in the '30s. Author Mankiewicz, 32, nephew of movie Writer-Director-Producer Joe (The Barefoot Contessa) Mankiewicz, chooses as his hero-victim an 18-year-old boy of Mexican descent who lives in a Southern California town that draws its color line tight as a noose. Straying from "Mex Town," Angel Chavez makes his first fumbling pass at a local girl on a restricted stretch of San Juno's beach one night, and she drops dead of a rheumatic heart. A brassy, card-carrying lawyer named Barney Castle helps save the boy from a lynch mob and takes him on as a client, but only for the Commie purpose of using Angel's case as party-line propaganda. While he rakes in folding money at a "Free Angel Rally," Barney turns over the boy's actual defense to David Blake, a solemn young law pro fessor out for "practical experience," who is too trusting to know what Barney's left ist hand is doing. The courtroom play-by play takes up most of David's time, and far too much of the reader's. But after hours, David climbs into bed with Bar ney's erstwhile mistress and they reach "unbearable ecstasy" together. Though David does his best in court, community prejudice and Communist tactics manage to do their worst. Politically primitive, rigged for a predictable outcome, and larded with cliches that fight for inattention, Trial must have won its own case against 885 other contestants while the jury's minds were out for a recess.

ONE ARM, by Tennessee Williams (211 pp.; New Directions; $4.50). This collection of short stories wears the scent of human garbage as if it were the latest Parisian perfume. Peopled with male and female prostitutes, harridans and homosexuals, the book first appeared in 1948 in a deluxe limited edition of 1,500 copies, has since brought $50 a copy as a raffish collector's item. While the edition is now no longer limited, the guiding theme undoubtedly is. Author Williams, 40, best known for his plays, snaps his literary shutter again and again on portraits of the hero as cripple, and on the human personality in states of hopeless, neurotic disrepair. One story, Portrait of a Girl in Glass, shines with a luminous pity that gives it a lonely merit. From this tale of a childlike drift-and-dream girl, her aggressive mother and restless brother, Williams later fashioned The Glass Menagerie, and the story, like the play, is evocatively moving and moon-haunted. For the rest, One Arm reads too frequently as if the chapters of Psychopathia Sexualis had been raided for TV skits.

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