Mixed Fiction

CEREMONY IN LONE TREE, by Wright Morris (304 pp.; Atheneum; $4), is set in the barren Nebraska plains country, where the author stalks his favorite game --the "Sears Roebuck Gothic" Midwesterners with souls imprisoned like "buzzing flies" in "God's cocoon." Morris has been compared variously to Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, even Mickey Spillane, but in this, his 13th book, he sounds more like a kind of slick-paper Nathanael West, without that gifted writer's savage humor. His story is wired to the tangled nerve ends of the collection of oddballs and misfits who stumbled in unrelieved bewilderment through The Field of Vision, including a sagging, dyspeptic housewife who stands weepingly on varicose-veined legs over the kitchen sink lamenting the candy-box sweetheart she never was, and her father, a mad old man of 90 who sits alone in a ghost town reliving the Death Valley days and Indian burials he never saw. Morris employs a vocabulary of extravagant and irritating symbolism; the characters ruminate at length about the "prison of their past," but Novelist Morris never makes clear who held the keys or who locked the door.

THE MAGICIAN OF LUBLIN, by Isaac Bashevis Singer (246 pp.; Noonday; $3.50), is a tender, philosophical tale about Yasha Mazur, who makes his living in the circuses and theaters of 19th century Poland. He can skate on the high wire, eat fire, swallow swords, open any safe or lock (if Yasha had chosen crime, they said in Lublin, no one's house would be safe), and, above all, charm any woman. Blithely, he considers himself neither Jew nor gentile: there is a Supreme Being, he decides, but one who reveals himself to no one and gives no indication of what is permitted or forbidden. As in his previous books and plays, Polish-born Author Singer delights in superstitious trappings --dybbuks, devils and such imps of Satan as the foul Dog of Egypt, who struggles with the Hound of Heaven for Yasha's soul. But there is little mystical murkiness in Singer's writing: it has a clean and sun-washed optimism, a sense of human uncertainty in the face of divine certainty, which Jewish Philosopher Martin Buber has described as "holy insecurity."

WATCHER IN THE SHADOWS, by Geoffrey Household (248 pp.; Atlantic-Little, Brown; $3.95), is one of those controlled British exercises in suspense in which the imminence of death seems as natural as the call of a thrush. An old manhunt expert, Author Household (Rogue Male, A Rough Shoot) this time offers a killer who stalks a zoologist, an Austrian antiNazi who served as a British agent in World War II. The zoologist lives as a contented, fortyish bachelor in a London suburb, but unfortunately for his bucolic peace of mind, he has spent some time in Buchenwald as a British spy successfully masquerading as a Gestapo captain. Naturally, the vengeful killer does not know this, knows only that he has a score to wipe out with a Nazi. If the characters seem led rather than driven, the details of the man hunt are always in sure hands, and it is plain that after all these years suspense is still a Household word.

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