Mixed Fiction

THE WATCHMAN, by Davis Grubb (275 pp.; Scribner; $3.95), is the latest of the author's marrow-chilling tales of good and evil, written in a style compounded of Hans Christian Andersen imaginativeness and American Gothic hyperbole. His Night of the Hunter (1954), a surefooted, poetic horror story of two children and a malevolent pursuer, was told with controlled passion. Now in The Watchman, Grubb has pulled out all the stops, piled terror on madness, disaster on helplessness. The book is a mixture of poetic rage against cruelty in man, a song in praise of physical love, a cry of despair at the blows dealt to the innocent young.

The watchman of the title is the sheriff of a West Virginia town in the Ohio Valley, an apostle of nonviolence who has never fired at a criminal. Big and fearless, he inspires such confidence in the townspeople that no one sleeps uneasy at night. Then a young man is murdered, the son of one of the town's best families and the boy friend of one of the sheriff's two daughters. Why couldn't the sheriff be found the day of the murder, or for a day or so after that? And how could Daughter Jill, so sweet and pure, shed her grief so soon and take up with her nymphomaniac sister's young lover? Any reader who thinks at this point that he is settling down to a Spoon River mystery or even a variant on An American Tragedy does not know his Grubb. As the story of the sheriff, his daughters and his dead wife unfolds, the murder is seen for what Grubb meant it to be: a mere clue to the piled-up passions and cruelties that led to it.

Taken as a case history of children warped by the self-indulgence of parents, The Watchman would seem like one of the more lurid chunks of a psychiatrist's notebook. But Grubb's debt to Freud is trifling compared with the grotesque vision of evil he has drawn from his imagination. As rape, adultery and warped fear of sex move through the book, tensions are set up. relaxed, and recharged right to the macabre ending. Sometimes Grubb's people speak and act with inspired sureness; at other times they simply deliver bombast. Few novelists overwrite so shamelessly; yet few have the same power to conjure up the forces of darkness.

TAKE A GIRL LIKE You, by Kingsley Amis (320 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $3.95), recalls that before novelists ruined a good dodge by inventing realism, a writer could blather pleasantly for three volumes on nothing more substantial than "She shouldn't, but will she?" Now everyone assumes that she will, but should she? The question is of grave concern to young women, their parents, psychiatrists and friends, but it is not a very good theme for an entire novel. A snickering approach inevitably blasphemes against Freud, and a serious treatment defames Boccaccio. In this somewhat disappointing book, Kingsley (Lucky Jim) Amis, most famous of the new British school of "red brick" writers,* takes a seriocomic line, thus offending both heroes.

At 20, Jenny Bunn cannot understand why every man who sees her behaves as if she were a hot cross. She is bright, friendly and no prude, although she is a virgin. But she is also stupefyingly sexy. Assaults of varying skill have been made upon her virtue almost daily since she turned 14, and unlike some girls whom men are always bothering, this bothers her, particularly after she leaves home to teach grammar school and falls in love with a Latin master named Patrick Standish. They meet, neck heavily, wrench apart, argue earnestly, and smoke more cigarettes than are good for them. This goes on for months, and toward the end of the novel the reader has begun to wish that Jenny and Patrick would either get on with it or take cold showers.

Now and then the book carries echoes of Lucky Jim's brattish humor, and Author Amis remains a shrewd, accurate observer of what sociologists call courtship patterns. He also has a message of sorts. After a particularly hectic session, Patrick tells Jenny bitterly that there are two kinds of men these days, the sort who despoil maidens as often as possible and the sort who have no desire to do so. The kind who wanted to but waited, he says, died out in 1914.

*So called because many of them--and most of their characters--went to "red brick" provincial universities. Amis himself went to Oxford, has taught at a red brick.

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