Fat & Lean

HE AND SHE (243 pp.)--Edward Le Comte--McDowell-Obolensky ($3.95).

Marriage being the subtle and precarious entente that it is. and politics being outranked only by religious and racial differences as a catalyst of conflict, it would seem that a novel about the marriage of a bone-bred conservative and a dogmatic liberal must at least provide a rattling good battle-report. For a time it looks as if this is what First Novelist Le Comte has produced. "He" is John Butterworth. a rather stuffy young Yale man who considers himself to be the best Latin teacher in the country. "She" is his wife Herta. a beautiful Viennese Jewish girl who fled Europe during World War II.

Their differences are almost too neatly balanced: he reads Edmund Burke, she William Morris: his creed is Responsibility and Self-Reliance. hers is that Socialism and Weakness make Right. Confronted, for instance, with that troglodytic species, the Manhattan bus driver, he remarks that bus drivers in Xew York are churlish savages, which is true, and she replies that they are working men whose low pay is small compensation for a hellish job--also true.

As the book commences, he and she are fanning a white flame of rage. They alternately argue bitterly and refuse to recognize each other's existence. The issue is the execution of a union leader named Krasnitz, who shot a plant owner when the man tried to cross a picket line. The facts make any judgment questionable, but to John, of course, Krasnitz is simply a murderer, and to Herta he is a martyr of the class war. As stubborn husband and angry wife sit before the television set waiting for Krasnitz to walk his last mile, the author examines his characters in two long microscopic flashbacks that take up the remainder of the novel.

These life histories are soundly written and the people they describe are interesting enough. But the book's structure is dissatisfying: the flashbacks bring John and Herta back to the present time and then simply drop them there on the last page--still sitting in grim, unhappy silence. The author promises a Shavian clash of right and left, Adam and Rib. and several times seems on the point of producing one. But he settles too easily for tepid psychologizing, of which Liere is a surfeit these days, rather than social satire, which is in short supply. What could have been a clever novel is. as it turns out. merely clever notes for one.

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