If you ever think of your neighbor as someone who should have his head examined, you may be more kindly disposed toward him after reading Irving Wallace's The Square Pegs (Knopf, $5), a biographical survey of offbeatitis. The author devotes himself to nine wacky examples of eccentricity, including cookie magnate Wilbur Glenn Voliva, who spent much of his time and fortune until his death in 1942 in attempting to prove that the earth was flat. But we have an especial fondness for Timothy Dexter who amassed a fortune by sending coals to Newcastle on the advice of a practical joker. With childish innocence, Dexter invested his savings in a boatload of Virginia soft coal which arrived at the precise moment when Newcastle was paralyzed by a coal strike. Bids for the shipment were enormous and thus was established another financial dynasty. At a time when books like The Organization Man and A Surfeit of Honey are telling us about American conformity, you can't help but get a kick out of Wallace's adroit portraits of "some Americans who dared to be different."
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Wright Morris' novel Love Among the Cannibals (Harcourt, Brace, $3.50) is short, straightforward and sexy. "Love among the vegetarians," the author observes, "is made with participles, unmade with verbs, honored, cherished and disobeyed with nouns. But love among the cannibals is flesh feeding on flesh." To prove his point, the author places two zany members of a song-writing team in Hollywood where they meet a couple of deep-dish cannibelles. Then it's off to Acapulco to make love. soak up sun and gobble chunks of local color for a musical idea they're working on. The composer has to marry his chick in order to get her to bed while the Greek Goddess who is the lyricist's dish is less demanding for her largesse: the owner of a trim yacht anchored in the harbor lures her away, leaving the disillusioned young man unexpectedly alone with time on his hands to philosophize about his notion that love is a kind of cannibalism which eats its objects. We doubt whether this will extend Mr. Morris' skein of honors (he copped this year's National Book Award). but it is a refreshing peek at Hollywood shenanigans.
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It would take a writer of excessively graceful and witty prose to concoct an entire novel out of the hallucinations in the protagonist's mind, but The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (Little, Brown, $3.75) is just such a novel and middle-aged Catholic English novelist Evelyn Waugh is just such a writer. A middle-aged Catholic English novelist is Gilbert Pinfold, too, who goes on a boat trip and, under the influence of conflicting doctor's prescriptions (bromide, chloral, brandy and some ominous gray pills), begins to hear voices: voices of young men threatening to beat him up. young women threatening to come to his bed, plus audio glimpses into international intrigues. messy murder. sexual depravity and other goodies. "You don't think he ought to see a psychologist?" his wife anxiously asks a physician upon Pinfold's return to the family hearthstone. "He can if he likes, of course," replies the medico on the book's last page, "but it sounds like a perfectly simple case of poisoning to me." Waugh himself is inclined to be less offhand: "He had endured a great ordeal and, unaided, had emerged the victor. There was a triumph to be celebrated."
