Riches to Rags an Innocent Millionaire

By Paul Gray

Hungarian-born Stephen Vizinczey, 52, already has one worldwide best seller to his credit. In Praise of Older Women (1965), a fictionalized erotic memoir of an apparently insatiable young man, was rejected by so many publishers that Vizinczey quit his broadcasting job in Toronto and paid to have the book printed. It went on to sell some 3 million copies in eight languages. His second novel, which arrives in the U.S. trailing clouds of praise from England, Germany, Canada and Australia, may do just as well. True, the sex this time around is considerably muted. But moods have changed over the past 20 years, and Vizinczey has cannily kept pace. The prime aphrodisiacs of the ^ '80s seem to be money and greed, and An Innocent Millionaire offers a spellbinding combination of both.

Though born in New York, Mark Niven spends his childhood being dragged through Europe while his father pursues acting jobs onstage or in Hollywood budget productions being filmed abroad. Ultimately, the alternation between poverty and short bursts of solvency proves too much for his parents' marriage. When they tell Mark, at age 14, that they are divorcing, he grieves, blames the world for blighting their happiness and reaches a decision: "People are monsters and I'd better get rich or I'll have to depend on monsters." After reading a book on sunken treasures, Mark becomes obsessed with finding a ship laden with the spoils of Peru that went down en route to the Caribbean in 1820. Years of research, to the exclusion of his schoolwork and to his father's growing annoyance, yield the final fragment of the puzzle. Mark knows he must go to Santa Catalina, a small out island in the Bahamas, where he will surely strike it rich.

Vizinczey does not bother to weave much suspense about this outcome; the question is not whether Mark will find the treasure but how. He seems in danger of being distracted by Marianne Hardwick, a beautiful woman who lives on the island with her two young sons while her husband runs his huge chemical company and philanders back home in Chicago. Their love affair is passionate and brief; she sends him packing when he will not abandon risky underwater explorations and his dream of wealth. But spies employed by Marianne's husband have caught her and Mark on film in compromising positions. He is in big trouble even before he finds a haul worth $300 million.

From this point on, Vizinczey's entertaining display of granted wishes takes a peculiar turn. He writes: "Perhaps nothing about Mark Niven's life is of such general significance as the way he lost his fortune." The ominous shadow of a moral descends over the proceedings. Mark must contend with a confiscatory Bahamian government, which demands half of his take before he even recovers it. Then other sharks start circling: an unscrupulous Manhattan art dealer named John Vallantine, who decides to relieve Mark of his remaining $150 million, and corrupt lawyers in the U.S. who gather to pick off the leftovers. Drowning in litigation, the hero asks his own lawyer, who has already secretly agreed to sell him out, how such things can happen. The reply: "Mark, the trouble with you is, you don't understand that evil is / stronger."

The author manages to tack on a happy, if decidedly downbeat, ending to Mark's long ordeal. But the image of an adventurous young entrepreneur being bled by institutional sponges dominates the novel; not since the palmy days of Ayn Rand has the cautionary example of free enterprise shackled been so forcefully put in fiction. On the other hand, Vizinczey never answers the most important question his story raises: Is money for its own sake worth pursuing? Both Mark Niven and his adversaries behave the same way; they pour ingenuity and energy into salvaging someone else's property. All of this activity, much of it set in glamorous surroundings, is vividly displayed, but it mixes poorly with the novel's crabbed, aggrieved philosophy. In the end, An Innocent Millionaire is easy to read but hard to swallow.