Notable

LOOK HOW THE FISH LIVE

by J.F. POWERS

190 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

What does the smile of the native optimist have to do with the groan from the cross? What cement will join a world of plastic to a world of Gothic stone? These are the persistent questions of J.F. Powers (Morte D'Urban), with Flannery O'Connor the finest American writer on Catholic themes. Powers' new group of short stories provides no answer, only a cosmic sigh.

The Powers parish of the '60s and '70s has become a beleaguered sanctuary, attacked on one side by the new breed from the seminary. Carrying guitars, speaking at sensitivity sessions, Powers' young priests yearn to say Mass with a beer mug or a coffee cup. They march to a canting faith that "religion (though not perhaps as we know it) is the coming thing," that "the clergy (though not perhaps as we know them) are the coming men." As if the counterculture crusaders were not cross enough for the old guard to bear, ignoramuses and half believers are constantly at work. In one story a bus driver's wife has an old-fashioned vision of Our Lady, more or less transfigured out of a tree. Her reported message to the world: "Keep Minnesota green."

In another tale, a white-haired bishop oversees the construction of a new cathedral. In the process an old cemetery is bulldozed and bones are unearthed and reburied. The final sacrilege is worse: the arch has no keystone--two rocks with a crack between, it seems, constitute the new style.

Occasionally Powers' exasperation and despair overcome him and his control slips. Then he is apt to plant heavy symbols: worms, lilies, a dead dove. But for the rest, he remains the creator of a small miracle: the only man besides John Updike who can write about salvation and damnation in a world rapidly becoming trivialized by loneliness and loss of ardor, a world with an end but no amen.

IN THE BEGINNING

by CHAIM POTOK 454 pages. Knopf. 5.95.

David Lurie is a gentle, sickly, abnormally intelligent child of the '30s, the natural prey of every strep germ and street bully in The Bronx. He is also a born survivor, protected by a warm and lively Orthodox Jewish family, and his narrative's interest turns not so much on whether David will escape his perils as on what he perceives with his wonderfully penetrating gaze. He sees, before anyone teaches him, the letters of two alphabets, Hebrew and English, and the intricate manner in which they relate. He sees his father, first as a vigorous, powerful man, respected by other Polish immigrants as the onetime leader of a guerrilla band in Galicia; then numbed and jobless, battered by the Depression. Finally and most poignantly, he sees the suddenly aged figure as a tired warrior, so embittered by pogroms and concentration camps that he opposes furiously any contact David may have with goyim--even if the non-Jews are biblical scholars. At the novel's end the boy has become a theologian following his own books, not his father's bitterness. The reader is at once unsurprised and informed, wholly aware of what it must have been like to belong to such a family and such a religion at such a time. Conveying vividly the exact feel of unfamiliar territory is a job almost exclusively performed by journalists. But as Chaim Potok (The Chosen) reminds us, the fact that novels can accomplish that task superlatively is one of the reasons why they are still written--and read.

A FAMILY AFFAIR

by REX STOUT

152 pages. Viking. $5.95.

Poirot: deceased. Maigret: retired. Martin Beck, Commander Gideon, Inspector West: gone, all gone with the recent deaths of their creators. Of the old breed, only Nero Wolfe is still doing business at the same old stand, his orchidaceous town house in Manhattan, backed and fronted as always by the ineffable Archie Goodwin. Like his corpulent hero, Author Rex Stout, 89, continues to confound the actuarial tables--and his followers. In this latest outing, Stout ups the stakes of the game he plays with readers. Three-quarters of the way through, Narrator Archie realizes the identity of the criminal and concedes, "You probably knew a while back." He is, in his own term, "grandstanding"; even veteran aficionados will be hypnotized by this witty, complex mystery. For lagniappe, Stout provides a delicious red herring--the case's tenuous connection to Watergate. Says Wolfe: "I would have given all my orchids--well, most of them --to have [had] an effective hand in the disclosure of the malfeasance of Richard Nixon." He announces that he drafted but did not send a letter to Leon Jaworski, offering his services. Pity the mail never went through. The national agony might have been avoided--well, most of it.

Stout relishes such topical references; they are an octogenarian's way of exhibiting an elastic, contemporary mind. Indeed, a few years after entering his eighth decade he wrote a Jesuit priest friend, signing himself Rex Stout, S.J.--for "still jaunty." So is Wolfe, who this time even goes to jail and gets his license suspended rather than tell the police anything about his own highly personal family affair. When the master detective has finally cracked the case, he settles back to "read books, drink beer, discuss food...logomachize with Archie." He asks a listener, "Shall I iterate and reiterate?" By all means, Mr. Stout. By all means.

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