Jovial, Middle-Aging Man

THE CONTENDERS (278 pp.)--John Wain--St. Martin's ($3.95).

Novelist John Wain, 33, is identified by his British critics and his U.S. publisher as one of the Angry Young Men, but his second novel to cross the Atlantic does not look back in anger. It is a lively, funny story, essentially an American-style narrative about how men make good in a bad way in the big city and learn that success in the end is nothing but dust and ashes.

The publishers describe The Contenders as "a novel of character," and there they are right. The narrator is a beer-pudgy reporter, a jovial, middle-aging man named Joe Shaw. His real name is Clarence, but he is "everybody's uncle" and therefore Joe. Self-described as "an uncouth provincial boor," he tells a tale of a pair of modern Dick Whittingtons who see London as "the pallid aviary of bank notes flapping their wings in time to the cunning chimes of Big Ben." The London-lured travelers are school friends who grew up together in a town where the pottery kilns were like "giant Burgundy bottles." Their characters are fixed as schoolboys; life, they are told, is competition.

For the archrivals it is barely a step from the wet cobblestones of the town that Joe dares not name to the even more bleak landscape of ambition. Ned is a cool, shrewd Organization Man, and Robert a hotheaded art-rebel type; as they grow up, Joe keeps score in their unending game of oneupmanship. One symbol of success that each plays off on the other is Myra Chetwynd, the dizzy-making model whom Robert and Ned take successively to the altar.

It grows steadily clearer that Ned, a tycoon in pottery, and Robert, a successful artist, are only a pair of sad dogs snarling for the same old bone, and barking up the wrong tree. Between the artist who sneers at "gobbets of bourgeois wisdom" and the businessman who is nothing but "a lousy provincial potter," it turns out to be fat, good-natured old Joe who achieves love, wisdom and an upbeat ending for good-natured young Novelist Wain.

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