The Rag Shop of the Heart

JUBB by Keith Waterhouse. 245 pages. Putnam. $3.95.

Literally, Jubb is a voyeur, a fetishist and pyromaniac. By all odds, his doings should add up to nothing more than one more nasty little British shocker--unoriginal as sin, boring as politics and derivative as all get-out. Instead, it is a remarkably good book. Through some weird alchemy of talent and restraint, Novelist Waterhouse has transformed an outrageously raw case history into a recognizably human portrait.

Jubb is horribly shy. He keeps a stiff upper lip about his strange afflictions, even when his grimy world is coming apart. He has traditional British hobbies--serving on a Good Neighbours Club, writing Keep Britain Tidy letters to the local papers, collecting back numbers of boys' magazines like Gem and Magnet through which he vicariously enjoys upper-class memories of "uncles with fivers, tuck shops, and inky fags." Acting as a rent collector in a shabby new housing development, he dreams of spending a week amid the iniquities of Hamburg's sex-riddled Reeperbahn. Yearning for some power to push him beyond compulsive peeping to the wilder shores of physical love, he finally cries out desperately: "There must be nymphomaniacs in the world. They do exist, they're not make up."

Poor crummy chap, Jubb can be looked on as a true scion of all British sexual repression. Just as handily, he can be seen as an underprivileged victim of the lingering class system.

But Writer Waterhouse has done his real work beyond easy symbolism and easier outrage, in the Dickensian world of created character. He is what a writer should be, no pamphleteer but a patient and compassionate exhibitor of the tender and grisly oddments that find themselves locked up, helter-skelter, in the strange rag-and-bone shop of the human heart.

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