How Are Things in Glocca Morra?

NO MAN'S TIME by V. S. Yanovsky. 224 pages. Weybright & Talley. $5.

The identity problem (again) is posed here more as a conundrum than a crisis. Cornelius Yamb is hired by a gangster syndicate to track down a nearmythical youth named Bruno, heir to a fabulous fortune. The quest leads him to a remote Canadian village, where to his surprise he is welcomed as Conrad

Jamb, long-lost deacon and husband of the minister's daughter.

Yamb-Jamb is strangely drawn into the curious life of this Utopian haven where time seems to have stopped just before the Industrial Revolution, and where in effect it stands still for two weeks every year (the no man's time of the title). The inhabitants of this intellectualized Glocca Morra all work at handicrafts, and their fundamentalismcum-science theology seems to. be a mixture of Billy Graham and Albert Einstein. Bruno himself turns out to be a mystical exponent of this theology. He claims to remember all of human history as if it were his biography, and he preaches that the key to identity is not the "I" of individual personality but the "we" of oneness with others and the universe.

The oneness is shattered when Cornelius hands Bruno over to the syndicate. Thereafter, in Chicago and New Yor,k, Cornelius loses his sense of himself and drifts feverishly into grubbing for a living. The girl who ran away from the village with him dies in a fire; word comes that Bruno has been senselessly murdered.

Author Yanovsky, 60, a Russian emigre physician and writer of seven novels published in Western Europe (this is the first to appear in the U.S.), seems to suggest that modern technological man has lost meaningful continuity with the broader patterns of human destiny. Yanovsky puts force into this familiar proposition by his crisp, evocative writing and the persuasive allure of his slightly disturbing Utopia. At the end, he sends Cornelius back to the village to take up life there as if he had never left. It is a neat finish for his tale, but, alas, he has left the reader no road map to that village.

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