(5 of 5)
Rita, naturally, falls in love with one of them. He is, naturally, a lout. But bad as he is, he makes Rita seem less listless and mousy. Margo vacillates between jealousy and the urge to tell Rita what favors she must grant lest she drive him off. Nellie seethes and tries not to notice. Nothing good can come of this, and nothing does.
Yet the novel's dreary lives are redeemed in the telling. Bainbridge's ear catches the tang of Liverpudlian argot ("My word, we do look a bobby dazzler"). The sisters' petty quarrels are small excursions of humanity in straitened circumstances. When Rita learns that her churlish soldier is illiterate, her dismayed brain is soon assuaged by her emotions. "Dear God, she thought, running up the cobbled alleyway, if he was that unschooled, he would need her, he would want to hold her in his life." Bainbridge unwisely changes her novel into a standard shocker on the final pages, but the ones that matter come earlier —shocks of recognition at the commonplace made extraordinary.
PORTERHOUSE BLUE by TOM SHARPE 219 pages. Prentice-Hall. $7.95.
If Wodehouse invented a plot and Waugh wrote a book round it, the result could hardly be more hilarious than this British mini-novel. The action involves the appointment of a feckless liberal politician as head of the ultra-conservative Porterhouse College at Cambridge University. When he proposes some changes—enrollment of women in the all-male college, for example—the faculty and staff staunchly resist.
Sharpe's characters are not so much etched in acid as flayed. The liberal college master glibly invents the slogan ALTERATION WITHOUT CHANGE. A longtime college servant muses, "Wog's in the Empire were different from wogs outside it and wogs in the Fox Club wasn't wogs at all or they wouldn't be members." There is a TV commentator whose carefully developed public image is that of a "lenient Jeremiah." Perhaps best of all, Sharpe presents a graduate student memorably beset by lust. Too diffident to ask for contraceptives in drugstores (where the clientele is mixed), he seeks them in barbershops (where contraceptives are also sold in Britain). But though he gets repeated "trims," he never gets a Durex. Is all this too British for U.S. tastes? Probably not; laughter knows no accent.