Short Notices

REMBRANDT, by Gladys Schmitt (657 pp.; Random House; $5.95), is a fictional retelling of the relatively few known facts about Rembrandt van Rijn's life. Novelist Schmitt (David the King, The Gates of Aulis) scraped every document, household inventory, drawing, etching and painting for underlying drama--and added countless tableaux of her own, which unfortunately look more like the sentimental Dante Gabriel Rossetti than Rembrandt.

The hero is first seen as a hotheaded and rather surly 17-year-old who is already the favorite apprentice of the local master painter in Leyden and is conceited enough to blurt: "Either I am a second Michelangelo or I'm an ass!" What follows is the detailed story of his success (when he wins his first noble patron), his failure (when his celebrated Night Watch insults prominent members of the local militia, whose faces he partially hid in the background), and his Job-like sufferings. One by one, father, mother, crippled brother and spinster sister go to their graves. Three children are either stillborn or die in infancy before a sickly son survives. Then the wife dies, the child's loving nurse goes mad, an apprentice is blown to smithereens in an accident. All this Author Schmitt tells, and sometimes poignantly. But long before she gets to the real tragedies in Rembrandt's life, she has squandered the reader's ability to react. In the first half of the book, each argument or frustration is magnified into a crisis; every silence is strained or charged. Despite such emotional impasto, the book has some authority in the field of art, where Author Schmitt has plainly done her homework on painters and the ways of masters and apprentices.

JIMMY RIDDLE, by Ian Brook (317 pp.; Putnam; $3.95) has as its hero the Walter Mitty ideal of every British public-school boy who grew up to be a frustrated colonial civil servant. Blond, bronzed and rugged, Jimmy Riddle is district commissioner of darkest Alabasa province in an unnamed British Colony in West Africa, a living legend to his fellow officers, and the sex-dreamboat of their wistful wives. In the end, Riddle turns against his own bumbling government, gets together with the Balabasa of Alabasa, the paramount chief and head of the Python Cult, and declares Alabasa an independent state.

This gives Author Ian Brook (a pseudonym) plenty of opportunity to rib the retreating Empire right up to No. 10 Downing Street, and to fire deft, satiric shots at everybody from an American anthropologist studying illiteracy among Alabasa's albinos to the new class of boorish, lawyer-bred African politicians ("The Prime Minister of the Colony laughed and picked at the hard skin on the ball of his foot"). Except for a dramatically faulty attempt to give Jimmy a realistic love affair, out of keeping with the otherwise admirably sustained, two-dimensional tone of spoof, Jimmy Riddle emerges a masterful Tarzan of the japes.

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