No Raincoats
By John Skow
THE NAIVE AND SENTIMENTAL LOVER
by JOHN LE CARR-L-
455 pages. Knopf. $7.95.
Not much doubt about it: John le Carre will one day be spoken of as a novelist who once wrote some good spy stories. But not just yet. Right now he is probably in for a series of sermonettes advising him that The Spy Who Came In from the Cold was all very well, but writing real novels is a serious business.
His new book is a comic novel with decent depth to it and not an upturned raincoat collar in sight. Its faults are obvious though not crippling. There are bright but purposeless pages. Le Carre takes far too long to find his narrative's focus. His hero, a rich pram manufacturer who discovers Life, sometimes wambles about in the state of blithering idiocy invented by Evelyn Waugh to let the air out of the upper middle class and reproduced more easily and less funnily since then by each successive Englishman to write a light novel.
Aldo Cassidy, the pram king, is 36 years old and nice, but numb. His wife, whose frigidity extends beyond sex, calls him by nursery names. One day he meets Shamus, a wild writer and roaring boy, and Helen, Shamus' fine, warm wife. He falls in love quite innocently with the pair of them. "Gradually, with the aid of a third bottle of wine and several names supplied by Shamus," le Carre writes, "Cassidy formed a picture of this wonderful band of brothers, this few: a non-flying Battle of Britain squadron captained by Keats and supported by Byron, Pushkin, and Scott Fitzgerald. As to Cassidy himself, he was their squire, polishing their fur-lined boots, posting their last letters and wiping their names off the blackboard when they didn't come back."
It dawns on the reader and finally on Aldo, however, that Shamus is not only a free spirit but a not-always-beguiling bully, who clubs his genius menacingly and insists that when he swings, everybody swings. Le Carre develops the implications of this in the novel's best sections. But, perhaps wary of the complexities he has set loose, he then retreats into farce. The result is seldom less than amiable, but seldom more than that either.
. John Skow
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