Books: Study in Frustration

THE ARTIST TYPE by Brian Glanville. 191 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.50.

The non-hero, non-artist protagonist and narrator of Brian Glanville’s novel is all temperament and no talent. Geoff Barnes has won a medal for acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but he is no actor. The bed is his stage, and he is good for any number of encores. What he hankers for, yearns after, aspires toward but cannot reach is a more status-bearing life. He writes a play and it is a dud. He enters advertising and discovers he is no good at it. His only true emotion is self-pity; his agony is that he must endure all the chic, swinging, semihighbrow parties before one of the nubile feathery birds will sing for him. A brisk, no-nonsense sort of novelist, Glanville catches wonderfully the spiv tone of conversation in swinging London. As a study in frustration, The Artist Type succeeds in making the reader sad for the hero, but not nearly so sad as the hero is for himself.