Current & Various

BACK TO CHINA by Leslie Fiedler. 248 pages. Stein & Day. $4.95.

Baro Finkelstone, the hero of Leslie Fiedler's latest novel, is a travesty of all the middle-aged Jewish liberals who ever lived in fiction. Pain is his pleasure. Having flagellated himself for Hiroshima, the plight of the Negro and the predicament of the American, he innocently demands: "Just tell me one thing I've done wrong." But in order to know that he is innocent, Finkelstone must suffer as though he were guilty, and Author Fiedler, who as a critic is the U.S.'s leading Freudian, cunningly assists his hero to find familiar occasions of guilt in the mythological murders of a father figure and a surrogate son. The father figure, an aged Japanese urologist, helps Finkelstone to discharge his guilt for what happened at Hiroshima by consenting to sterilize the silly schnook; the urologist's death is only casually connected with the affair, but Finkelstone greedily takes the blame for it. The surrogate son, a Sioux scholarship student turned beatnik, helps Finkelstone to engage in hallucinogenic mushroom-munching; the beatnik's death is only remotely related to the hero's spree, but Finkelstone thirstily accepts responsibility. The novel is grotesque and often unpleasant, but it is also funny and unexpectedly successful as the study of a converse Candide who believes that all is for the best in the worst of all possible selves.

THE NINE-TIGER MAN by Lesley Blanch. 246 pages. Afheneum. $4.50.

In synopsis, this novel suggests just one more Yul Brynner movie. In detail, it is something quite different: a wildly funny satire. Brynner's part is taken by the Rao Jagnabad, a glitteringly bejeweled, savagely personable hunter-princeling known as the Nine-Tiger Man. When the Sepoy Mutiny erupts in Delhi, the English dispatch their women to the Rao's palace, confident that they will be out of harm's way. The Rao briskly institutes a private mutiny of his own. He transforms the matrons into concubines, and the proper Victorians are soon fighting to embrace a fate worse than death. The romantic and violent 19th century is Author Lesley Blanch's special province. Painter, stage designer, film critic and ex-wife of Novelist Romain Gary, she has written several skillful biographies of the period (The Wilder Shores of Love, The Sabres of Paradise). In this book, her first novel, she proves herself a comic writer with a range of wit that can make her readers grin, giggle, gasp, even explode into laughter.

CORONATION by Jose Donoso. 262 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

Elisa Grey de Abalos, 94, widow of a prominent Chilean politician, is mad. The Santiago mansion over which she reigns is rotting. Her housekeepers get drunk. Her nursemaid turns thief, gets pregnant. And her only living relative, Grandson Don Andres, 54, is a cultured celibate who has made a career of reading French history and collecting walking sticks. To top it off, Elisa has a vocabulary astonishingly rich in four-letter words and an imagination so diabolical that most of her maids flee in horror. For all her madness, though, the old girl has a no-nonsense way of getting at life's underlying absurdities. Her crude remarks on sex unleash in Bachelor Andres a flood of feeling he never knew he had. Her chatter about death, "like raising the lid halfway on a multitude of potential horrors," brings him up short against a fact he cannot face, finally drives him insane too. In short, before she kicks off herself, Elisa gives what is left of her country's crumbling upper crust a well-placed foot in its foibles. Though Novelist Donoso, a Princeton-educated Chilean, attends the aristocracy's wake with almost gruesome glee, he seems a trifle wistful when the senile senora stops babbling and gives up the ghost. He should. She has, after all, put plenty of spunk into an old story.

AN AREA OF DARKNESS by V. S. Naipaul. 281 pages. Macmillan. $5.95.

"Indians defecate everywhere . . . beside the railway tracks ... on the beaches ... on the river banks . . . on the streets ... on floors. . . . These squatting figures are never spoken of; they are never written about. The truth is that Indians do not see these squatters and might even, with complete sincerity, deny that they exist." Trinidad-born Novelist Naipaul, paying a first visit to the land of his Hindu grandfather, is determined not to avert his eyes from such sights, which tourists and the Indians themselves ignore or miss. He observes "the ceremonial washing of the genitals in public before prayers." He ponders four sweepers whose ritual effort only makes a hotel staircase dirtier than before "They are not required to clean. That is a subsidiary part of their function, which is to be sweepers, degraded beings." In Gorakhpur his critical gaze falls on the bazaar: "The sweetshops are required to have glass cases; the cases accordingly stand, quite empty, next to the heaps of exposed sweets." Naipaul's candid view of India is attenuated, unfortunately, by a slightly patronizing air. The squalid, unpleasant truths are trotted out for their shock value, and he never lets the reader forget that he is the author of five novels acclaimed by Western critics.

THE PRIME MINISTER'S DAUGHTER by Maurice Edelman. 246 pages. Random House. $4.95.

Homosexuals infiltrate Her Majesty's Exchequer. Heterosexual backbenchers make hay with the P.M.'s daughter. The P.M.'s wife dosses down with her husband's brother. Ruthless press lords sow scandal and reap circulation. Ministers waffle and ministries totter, but merry England somehow muddles through and the parliamentary wits go right on making parliamentary witticisms: "The only advantage of being in the Lords is that you lose your constituents." In this as in his previous novels (Who Goes Home, The Minister), Maurice Edelman, Member of Parliament for North Coventry, pretends to tell the reader what actually transpires in the murky corridors of power. Nothing if not partisan, Laborite Edelman has posited a Tory Prime Minister. Most British readers seem convinced that his stuff comes straight from the lion's mouth --in recent months they have had a high old time trying to figure out Who's Who in his cast of characters. U.S. readers will mildly enjoy the transatlantic tattle.

NICE TRY by Thomas Baird. 280 pages. Harcourf, Brace & World. $4.95.

Warhol soup cans vie for the ready money with old masters. Alfalfa fortunes, born yesterday, successfully bid for art treasures against landed wealth. Rich plumbers dispossess the gentry on art-museum boards. Such propositions tickle Baird, an art insider, who deserted a gilt-framed career (New York's Frick Collection, Washington's National Gallery of Art) in favor of novel writing. Baird wields a deft brush to capture art's comic possibilities, but he wastes his brush strokes on a canvas of postage-stamp size.

FRED ALLEN'S LETTERS edited by Joe McCarthy. 359 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.

To anyone who can still remember the late Radio Comedian Fred Allen's dry wit, these letters will seem a disservice to Allen's ghost. To anyone who cannot, sorting through this epistolary mountain for the occasional glint of gold will seem hardly worth the effort. The nuggets are there all right; even in his casual correspondence, Fred Allen could not resist the comic muse, whether diagnosing his own health ("I find myself winded after raising my hat to a lady acquaintance") or commiserating with a toothless pal, who "has been living by sucking the butter off asparagus." Freelance Writer Joe McCarthy, who claims to have edited this collection, did no such thing.

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