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Books: Also Current: Feb. 26, 1965

4 minute read
TIME

A MATTER OF BLUE CHIPS by William Wetmore. 185 pages. Doubleday. $3.95.

Young Wall Street Broker W. Lockwood Thompson, expectably enough, is an Episcopalian; but all he really believes in is old money and old family (twelve generations), and he observes that faith by celebrating 365 Condescension Days a year. This condescension drips like ungentle rain on anyone beneath—club stewards, upstairs maids, college deans, headwaiters, and Mike Connor, an upstart Irish colleague in his uncle’s brokerage house. Then, at age 30, “Lock” suddenly suffers a rupture in his social conscience, a vestigial organ that probably never bothered a Thompson before.

The first anguished twinge comes one evening when he invites Connor to the top-drawer Shore Club for the perverse I purpose of seeing him bankrupted at backgammon. Instead, Connor winds up $4,000 ahead, the well-born clubmen welsh on their losses, and Thompson begins to question himself. The answers he tries out are, successively, drinking, urinating on the Shore Club walls, and letting himself be cuckolded by, of all people, Connor. The disintegration of Lock Thompson evokes less pity or terror than tedium. Though Author Wetmore has a palate for sour-mash dialogue, he puts into a quart bottle what in John O’Hara’s hands might have been a high-proof short snort.

A MAN OF MEANS by Luis de Sttau Monteiro. 188 pages. Knopf. $3.95.

In that bygone era when Newton could conceive of the solar system as a kind of eternal clockwork, and most people thought of the social system in much the same terms, a favorite toy for grownups was the sort of music box in which tiny lords and ladies, shepherds and shepherdesses perform an elaborate, unchanging dance. Portuguese Author Monteiro has constructed his odd novella of life in modern Lisbon like one of those antique music boxes. The effect is quietly damning. The figures are a rich man, Gonçalo, his empty-headed wife, their idealistic young son, Gonçalo’s stupid mistress Alexandra, and António, an old schoolmate fallen on hard times. As the key is wound and the book begins to tick, Gonçalo meets António. Then he sees his wife, then Alexandra. The programmed gears carry Alexandra to António and back to Gonçalo. The wife meets the son, and so forth. As each permutation comes up and repeats, Gonçalo is even able to imagine himself as the toymaker, manipulating the others and despising them —until suddenly the friend’s death and the son’s rebellion bring the modern world about Gonçalo’s ears in a tangle of broken springs and toothless gears.

THE VISITORS by Nathaniel Benchley. 248 pages. McGraw-Hill. $4.95.

In an article he once wrote on the art of loafing, Humorist Nathaniel Benchley (Robert’s son) recommended: “Do nothing, but appear busy.” His latest novel heeds that advice. Assorted human beings and ghosts scurry frantically about a haunted house in New England. One ghostly incident is followed by another—a flying tumbler, a fleeting shadow, a disembodied goose. Assuming that it is a whale of a joke to have a ghost sink an old curmudgeon’s opulent yacht docked outside the house, Benchley lets the ghost sink a second one. The ghosts, to be sure, have more life than the characters who are purportedly alive. There is Ebenezer, the ghost of a sullen, shifty sea captain who made a wraith of his infelicitous wife Felicity with a meat cleaver; and there is plump, blonde Jenny, who in her lifetime was known as a “hoor” among the townsfolk and who still plies her trade among the restless spirits. The novel is hardly more substantial.

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