Mixed Fiction

WATER Music, by Bianco VanOrden (254 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $3.95), is at bottom an old-fashioned novel about the tortuous ways of young love, even if its style flashes like high-IQ gossip and the characters are as plausibly etched as perfect counterfeit money. In 309 East & a Night of Levitation (TIME, Oct. 7, 1957), Author VanOrden showed a nice disinterest in anything ordinary. Now she makes up ordinary faces as if they were being prepared for an Italian fancy-dress ball. Her young Americans are rich, educated and self-consciously tortured by love and the need to prove that art and personality are more important than money and family. All are friends living in a convention-clamped New England university town. Except for Harold, a humorless but kindly culture-vulture, they would much sooner make a sexual slip than be caught uttering a cliche. Bayard works full time at being a snob and composer. His sister Cally paints, keeps hopping into beds, and wonders if true love will always pass her by. Tosh is a poet who has just been ditched by a beautiful girl who is reasonably sure that it is possible to live by bread alone.

Author VanOrden sends them all off to Italy on holiday. They are herded, shooed and advised, but never chaperoned, by a sophisticated marchesa. Living in a Florentine convent, they talk, dream, paint, write, compose, writhe in the agonies of their love affairs, while the sisters of the convent go calmly about their business and the great art of Florence forms a soothing backdrop. Author VanOrden's plot seems hardly worth the time. What is best about her flashingly literate book is the handsomely sketched Florentine setting, against which the bright chatter of her young Americans seems like a volatile gas, dissipated before the old city is even aware of its presence.

FLASH AND FILIGREE, by Terry Southern (204 pp.; Coward-McCann; $3.50), recalls the two-reeler comedies of the silent movies, in which scenes would begin prosaically--with a tea party or dinner in a restaurant--and then break into paroxysms of action. This technique underlies this first novel by Texan Terry Southern, 34, who lives and writes in Switzerland. The book opens quietly at a posh Los Angeles clinic where Dr. Frederick Eichner, "world's foremost dermatologist," listens to the symptoms of a new patient, Felix Treevly. Six pages later the calm is shattered by a verbal and physical violence, and the book careens off on a hounds-and-hares chase that dooms Patient Treevly and involves the pragmatic Dr. Eichner in an auto crash, murder, and the machinations of a monstrous private eye named Martin Frost.

Side by side with Dr. Eichner's misadventures runs the dewy romance of Nurse Babs Mintner and her college-boy lover. This minor theme leads to the funniest scene of an often funny novel: the seduction of featherheaded Babs which takes place one rainy night in a drive-in theater and rages through three continuous showings of Wuthering Heights. There are other comic set pieces, notably a TV quiz called What's My Disease?, where panelists triumphantly identify gruesome samples of elephantiasis, icthyosis and multiple goiter.

Author Southern's California of wide-screen girls, cultists, simpletons and satyrs has been seen before in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One and in the misanthropic novels of Nathanael West. Southern hits more gently than Waugh or West, and is not so accomplished a writer. Though he is strikingly inventive in short scenes, he seems unable to plot beyond a dozen pages. Like the old two-reelers, Flash and Filigree lacks weight and discipline, but it also has an unfailing sense of the ridiculous, heightened by deadpan delivery.

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