BOOKS
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
HECKLETOOTH 3. By David Shetzline. Random House. $5.95.
WHEN THE WAR IS OVER. By Stephen Becker. Random House. $5.95.
FAT CITY. By Leonard Gardner. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $5.50.
GOING DOWN. By David Markson. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. $5.95.
THE LIFE
&
LOVES OF MR. JIVEASS NIGGER. By Cecil Brown. Farrar,
Straus and Giroux. $5.50.
Most of the novels at hand try, really try as one of their
central themes (or burdens) to proclaim their relevance, or, as a pretty,
vacant co-ed said, "revelance." I have come to like her malapropism for
it is a revelation we still want from fiction, an act of the imagination
that will illuminate events, not a dutiful touching of the bases when the
novelist feels he must get in the game.
Heckletooth
3 by David Shetzline is a case in point: an accom–
plished writer has unnecessarily cluttered his basic metaphor for Amer–
ican individualism with easy references to the significant world that the
reader would better make on his own. The hero of
H eckletooth
3 is a
loner in the forest service who shoots an elk out of season to save the
lead dog of his pack - and thereby hangs a tale meant to encompass the
spectrum of our society. At his worst Shetzline spoils a good thing by
being overexplicit. His hero
thinks:
Who went down into Texas and took a zillion of Texas oil and
still never pays a cent tax? Who's over in Asia messing with every–
thing they can get their hands on?
And then he
says
to the sheriff who still doesn't know he's the culprit
:
who killed out of season:
"There's been an awful lot of taking in this country, Bobby."
