HIDE FOX, AND ALL AFTER by RAFAEL YGLESIAS 203 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.
It is not often that a writer sees his main character as clearly and directly as Rafael Yglesias sees Raul, the precocious 14-year-old who bombs out of private school in this brief and crystalline first novel. The author avoids displays of virtuosity, the pleasures of romantic posturing, and all other possible uses of fiction except this one: to watch with great care a being who fascinates him. The steadiness and detachment of his view would be remarkable in any case, but are truly astonishing for a writer who was exactly 15 years old when he wrote the novel.
Raul is a good subject, a tangle of immaturities held together by intelligence. He hides as much of the jumble as he can behind a pose that is half self-satire. The "Black Prince," as he calls himself in mockery, is a mannered, deadly literary duelist who slices fellow students and blundering adults into home fries with razor-edged misquotations. The Black Prince is a devilish smoker of cigarettes and a virgin, who is torn between self-disgust at this fault and contempt for the mawkishness of teen-age passion.
As the novel begins, Raul sits in a beanery in The Bronx, near the Cabot School, wrapped in a satisfying combination of doom and glory. He is preparing to cut classes for the tenth straight day. Fascinated classmates crowd round to be recognized or snubbed, as black-princely honor requires. Expertly—he is practiced at this—Raul builds his mood from their reactions. He must have theater. Alec, a worldly friend, asks why Raul has dressed in black. "I'm in mourning for my life," he replies. "Who is that from?" asks Alec, a bit off balance. "Chekhov," says Raul. "Ah, yes. But what play?" says Alec, recovering nicely. " 'The Sea Gull, I think. Yes, definitely, The Sea Gull.' He knew damn well it was The Sea Gull. But the footwork was marvelous."
Not all that marvelous, but the author (surprisingly, considering his age) sees this. When Yglesias sets down Raul's dilemma, which is how to keep well-intentioned authority from marking his mind before it can grow an adequate protective shell, he does it without the self-pity that might be expected of a young writer. His Raul is induced to return to school temporarily, where he performs brilliantly as Rosencrantz in a production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Rosencrantz is more or less his role in life at the moment.
Comparisons with The Catcher in the Rye are inevitable, simply because all novels about youth in flight are still measured against Salinger's. But what such a weighing shows is chiefly that Yglesias' tone—far more detached than Salinger's—is completely his own and that Holden Caulfield would now be pushing 40. Salinger's novel is a wholly mature work. Yglesias is still capable of childish sentences. But his is a superior novel, without regard to the age of its author. In the end, when Raul has dropped out of school for good, it is hard to know whether his flight is self-preservation or self-destruction, and to the reader this matters very much.