Current & Various

THE MAGICIAN'S WIFE by James M. Cain. 233 pages. Dial. $3.95.

For 30 years, Novelist James M. Cain has worked a literary lode bordering a trash heap. Even his best works -The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity -reeked of their neighborhood, and no doubt as a consequence were made into movies. In this novel, his sixteenth, Cain has at last achieved breakthrough. The Magician's Wife is pure trash. The book is so bad, in fact, that it is redeemed by its own absolute sins against credibility, plot, characterization and style. Reading it becomes a suspenseful exercise in disbelief, in which the reader is sustained, as well as stunned, by Cain's inexhaustible capacity for compounding meretriciousness. The end effect is one of near admiration. Who else could have executed such a perfect travesty of Cain?

THE DEATH OF WILLIAM POSTERS by Alan Sillitoe. 317 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

Labor is in and the Angries are out. They still go on writing, but they don't have much to say. In this novel, Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) retells the tired old tale of a working-class yob who decides to chuck it all and live a little. He says ta-ta to his spouse and house, toddles off with a well-educated wench, ends up in Algeria running guns to the rebels and imagining he is out of the ruck and into the luck. Sillitoe was always a careless writer, and now that he is crassly cashing in, he is grossly sprawling out. He is inaccurate: "They were attracted like two magnets in a field of iron filings." He is prolix: "Frank kicked him, a hand cracking on flesh, and the purple, spark-fanged floor on the sway and loose burst at Keith like a piece of ice over the eye-face. Keith reacted, fist bursting, a whalehead driving across the light, packed with flintheads and darkness." He is even ungrammatical: "Walking along black midnight roads, the wound of his separation opened." It should have taken a bus.

MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND by Claude Brown. 415 pages. Macmillan. $5.95.

While still in his early teens, Claude Brown was the coolest of Harlem cats: smoker of pot, snuffer of cocaine, graduate of two reform schools, expert in the arts of bebopping (gang warfare), Murphying (a form of pimping), jugging (fornication) and stinging (armed robbery). Then Brown moved downtown, found a square job, took up the jazz piano and earned a high school diploma attending classes at night. This autobiography is Brown's testament, not to his redemption but to his misspent youth. Nowhere does he explain what inner strength rescued him from himself; the reader must consult the dust jacket to learn that Brown went on to graduate from Howard University, and will enter law school this fall. Instead. Brown sifts steadfastly and self-consciously through the dung heap of his past. A little discipline of the sort that altered the course of Brown's life might also have rescued it as a story.

THE TROUT by Roger Vail/and. 253 pages. Dutton. $4.50.

At the age of 16, Frederique swore that she would get what she wanted from men and never give anything in return. She married a provincial homosexual, set herself up as a confidence-woman. With her husband as a partner, she euchred a couple of well-to-do industrialists out of 800,000 francs. Partly out of a desire for revenue, partly out of simple desire, both industrialists decided to seduce the lady. She agreeably went off to America with one of them, came back with her virginity intact. Then she convinced the other man that she loved him, provoked him into a ruinous financial scheme, deserted him. Novelist Vailland. a sometime Communist who died in May, was also a successful journalist and film scenarist (Les Liaisons Dangereuses). His prizewin-nine novel, The Law, was a compelling study of greed, lust and power politics in a small Italian town. In his present book he aims to tell the ironic, chilling story of a modern Diana who hunts a different species of bulls and bears. Author Vailland seems to think the lady is hot stuff, but most readers will find her just one more frigid bitch.

THE PEACOCK'S TAIL by Edward Hoag/and. 257 pages. McGraw-Hill. $5.50.

Saul Bellow has called him "one of the very best writers of his generation." He has won Guggenheim and Houghton Mifflin fellowships, and is currently living in Greece on a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Critics found his earlier books, The Cat Man (about circus life) and The Circle Home (about boxing), flat on characterization and rickety on plot, but praised him as a stylist. The Peacock's Tail is the story of a youne New Yorker's trials after he loses his girl Sandy to a Jewish rival. He becomes a refugee in a West Side hotel inhabited by whores and derelicts. Most of the book recounts his oscillating between Sandy's upper-class East Side apartment and his West Side slum. As for style, here are some examples: ' 'Wolf, wolf,' he woofed"; "she took the smoke forms of his own emotion, and sopped up looks and flung them off as if she were electrified"; "her breasts were big jubilant bells without needing to swing, her waist was a scooping of lissome lines."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.