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This shallow breathing occurs during a doleful evening in which Clara and three other skinless neurotics are bullied in a desultory way by a thick-skinned fifth person, Clara's frightful mother Laura. The other characters are Clara's drunken stepfather; her uncle, an exhausted, ironical pederast; and a middleaged, neuter male publisher who is a family friend. There is too much drinking, too much smoking, too much acute description of mental states. The author, unwilling to waste a scrap of anguish, views the browned-out scene through the eyes of each gloomy participant in turn. Boredom, peevishness and tobacco smoke solidify into a gel. Everyone has dinner in a restaurant, and it takes a long time to order.
The truth, of course, is that no parody is intended in The Widow's Children. The author sets her dismal characters in their tedious situation quite seriously, as if advancing the theory that any well-described vacuum constitutes a novel. The central non-event of the evening is that Laura's own mother Alma has died a few hours ago, but only Laura knows this. She refuses to tell anyone, presumably because the evening will seem even more pointless and ghastly when the truth finally is learned. "One has to take your mother seriously, but not in the usual sense," says the publisher wisely to suffering Clara. The remark fits the book itself, a strange and exasperating display of becalmed talent by the author of Desperate Characters and Poor George, novels much praised, among other things, for their "merciless observation."
THE HAMLET WARNING by LEONARD SANDERS 280 pages. Scribners. $7.95.
Given some commonplace materials, a simple lab and a certain amount of fissionable uranium or plutonium, almost any competent physicist can build an atom bomb nowadays. This unfortunate fact of technological life has stirred dire warnings that sophisticated terrorist groups might build such bombs and use them to blackmail the world —a kind of ultimate crime. While the prospect causes a great deal of official worry, it also provides almost any competent thriller writer with a readymade plot that has everything: timeliness, tremendous stakes and, above all, the appalling specter of a mushroom cloud billowing over a peaceful land.
Author Leonard Sanders has taken advantage of all these literary options.
Most of his fast-paced little novel is set not in (or near) the centers of world power but in the underdeveloped and overpopulated Caribbean country of Santo Domingo. There Clay Loomis, a disaffected CIA agent turned soldier of fortune, serves as chief of security to the current dictator. His main job: trying to quell a guerrilla movement led by one RamÓn el Rojo. It is a loosing battle; before long RamÓn starts a Castro-type revolution that spreads through Santo Domingo like Asiatic flu.