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What the Germans called the Kunstlerroman and what James Joyce titled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man have pretty much become scorched earth through overuse. Still, Author James Atlas, whose biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977) earned admiring attention, invests an old story with some amusing twists. His hero Ben Janis hits adolescence during the early 1960s in Evanston, Ill., the cherished son of Jewish parents who want a better life for him. Trouble is, their life looks just fine to Ben, as do some female high school classmates who have scant interest in higher education. But Ben's father will settle for nothing less than a budding T.S. Eliot on the family tree: "He was furious when Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe. 'The man has a responsibility to the intellectuals in this country . . . We'll lose credibility.' " The lad goes off to Harvard and then Oxford, performing quite competently while wondering all the way what exactly he is doing. Not all of Ben's problems are as interesting as Atlas seems to believe, and the hero's feckless passivity does not create overwhelming suspense. But there are more than enough funny moments to make this circular journey from callow youth to immature adult worth taking.
CAMPING OUT
by Eleanor Clark
Putnam; 223 pages; $16.95
Eleanor Clark, 72, the wife of U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Penn Warren, has built her own estimable literary reputation with such works as Rome and a Villa and Baldur's Gate. Her ninth book, Camping Out, is a tour de force of minimalist storytelling, demonstrating how dizzyingly complex and satisfying an outwardly slight novel can be. Two women, old acquaintances rather than friends, take a brief canoe trip that becomes moodily romantic--a shock, if a pleasant one, to the previously heterosexual younger woman. The trip then turns terrifying when a male psychopath "befriends" them. In counterpoint are the younger woman's recollections of four generations of her warped- genteel family. Her memory album sprawls from 19th century San Francisco to postwar Italy and features a breathless narrative pace and an unerring rhythm.
MANHUNT
by Peter Maas
Random House; 301 pages; $17.95
Where did Colonel Gaddafi get the destructive wherewithal to conduct his campaign of international terrorism? From whoever would sell it to him, including a former CIA agent. In Manhunt, Peter Mass (The Valachi Papers, Serpico) recounts the tangled story of Edwin Wilson, an ex-spook turned merchant of death. During the late 1970s, Wilson sold millions of dollars' worth of arms to the Libyan leader. The deadly shipments included some 20 tons of the powerful explosive C-4, packed in five-gallon cans of oil-drilling lubricant. Wilson also organized camps to train terrorists. Meanwhile, the man who earned little more than $25,000 a year from the CIA was living on a $2 million estate in rural Virginia and had friends in high places. But influential connections could not save Wilson from a determined U.S. prosecutor named E. Lawrence Barcella Jr. Four years of investigation and legal action resulted in Wilson's conviction: he is currently serving combined sentences totaling 52 years in the federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill.