Books: A Nice Japanese Girl

O FOR A MASTER OF MAGIC by Josh Greenfeld. 186 pages. New American Library. $4.95.

The author, an able freelance book reviewer, has obviously read a lot of fiction. That alone, however, is no guarantee of success when the critic turns novelist. Greenfeld’s hero is a Jewish boy from Brooklyn becalmed on the long voyage to a Ph.D. He marries a Japanese painter, and they go to live near her parents in Japan. Like so many young men in novels these days, he pokes and prods his identity obsessively; after a few months in Japan he worries that he still feels like a New Yorker.

He is in love with his wife’s deeply feminine nature; yet her serenity makes him irritable and her confidence bruis es his ego. He turns to other women, including his own mother-in-law, before accepting the fact that he has married well in spite of himself. The author writes in an easy, almost slangy style. But despite a refreshingly genial tone and an accurately observed setting, this first effort cries out for a master of magic who could turn some promising notes into a novel.