Books

Early in Edward Mannix' An End to Fury (Dial, $4.95) our hero, Vince Boyle, a would-be writer, stands on the Florida strand and yells in the direction of Cuba and Ernest Hemingway: "Hey, Ernie -- I'm drunk and you can go to hell!" But it's James T. Farrell he should have cocked his fist at, for this first novel is a raw, rowdy, randy rendering of an Irish slum family -- the Boyles of Jersey City -- seen mostly through the hard eyes of the aforementioned Vince. What plot there is concerns Vince's love-hate for his family and his effort to find himself after a hitch in the Navy and a stint with a carny. But it's the full-length portraits of the Brueghelian Boyles which are the book's standout feature. Unfortunately, Mannix, who can really write, is preoccupied with the priapic. Result: what could have been high-fission fiction is notable chiefly for its phallic fall-out.

•

Romain Gary, French diplomat, evidently doesn't believe in letting his left hand know what his write-hand is doing. Though he's paid to pitch Gallic goodwill, his new novel, Lady L. (Simon & Schuster, $3.50), may set Anglo-French relations back to 1066. For this delightfully high-styled harlequinade is based on the proposition that the career of one of Britain's most esteemed dowagers was based on a proposition. At 80, Lady L., who's about as U as U can get, slyly reveals that her origins are not only non-U, but positively sub-U. Seems she started out as a Paris prostie and -- worse -- became finger-girl for a ring of anarchists. Armand, the ace anarchist, was tall, dark, glandsome; and she was his willing slave in the moments he could spare from making -- and throwing -- bombs. But when he got her pregnant, she fingered him and married a 60ish sybarite who was also one of England's noblest dukes, then settled down to grande-dame it. Re-enter Armand, on the lam, his anarchist-kisses still sweeter than wine. What to do? Boccaccio would have no trouble guessing.

•

Denis Jenkinson of the London magazine Motor Sport is famous among automobile racing types for his account of his ride with Stirling Moss in the 1955 Mille Miglia race in Italy. They did the 1000 miles at an average of 95 miles an hour, the all-time record, Jenkinson reading the road from a 17-foot-long roller map and signaling Moss to take blind humpbacks at 175 mph. He has just published a remarkable book, The Racing Driver (Batford, $5), and sports car buffs who wish to know what automobile driving is like will dig. In a field not notable for literary landmarks, Jenkinson has set up a mile-stone: a study of the characteristics peculiar to the Grand Prix racing driver, who, like the mountain climber and the bullfighter, puts his life on the line every time he plays his game. A veteran of perhaps 20,000 miles as passenger at racing speeds with the best drivers in the world, Jenkinson knows the marks of greatness, from freak vision (Stirling Moss can identify the driver of a car so far away that other eyes can make out no more than the color of the car) to the aberration that makes some men unable to drive safely at slow speeds. Diagrams demonstrate the incredible techniques of the maestri and the vital over-steer and under-steer characteristics every automobile shows under stress. The book is an imperative for anyone who thinks he can drive. In its field, it is The Word.

•

The ups and downs and ins and outs of a pool shark provide the theme of Walter Tevis' novel, The Hustler (Harper, $3.50). A pool shark, and you may be forgiven for not knowing, is a pocket-billiards devotee of superior proficiency who preys on chumps. Since the game of his choice offers him small opportunity to make money openly as a professional, he is driven to enticing less skillful players into taking him on for wagers, letting them win a few, nursing them along until they are confident enough to bet serious money, and then whupping them. When the pool shark is good enough, he can pit himself against his peers under his own identity, and for four-figure bets, a line of activity preferable to hustling chumps, for the hustler who's detected is likely to have unpleasant things done to him: his hands may be laid flat on a table, for example, and his fingers broken, one by one, with the fat end of a cue. Mr. Tevis is dealing here with basics: passion, pity, the brute struggle for survival. No epic, this novel is still a small tour de force, easily read, long remembered. Author Tevis did some earlier exploratory surgery on the poolroom half-world in a Playboy story also called The Hustler (January 1957).

•

After a lapse of six years, Stephen Potter, Dean of the Lifemanship Correspondence College, has come up with his third handbook, Supermanship (Random House, $3), the dust jacket of which carries the subtitle "how to continue to stay top without actually falling to pieces." This slim volume is one of the best examples we've seen in a long time of how to run a good thing into the ground. Veteran Lifemen are bound to be disappointed and not a little disheartened with the way in which Potter has deserted to the camp of the enemy and turned the study of Lifemanship into a course designed to give the most inept pupil a straight A. Gone are the subtle though often strenuous ploys that were so rewarding -- gone, to be replaced with advice on expectant Father-ship and how to deal with Superbaby and his begetters. Other boring topics include Supertown versus Supercountry, roughly analagous to our native sports of Tenderfoot baiting and Rube calling; Office partyship, including such A.D.C. (After Dale Carnegie) ploys as being attentive to the Boss' ugly secretary; and even a short section on British car ploys with advice on how to make other British car owners insecure because your car is newer (older, faster, slower, larger, smaller) than their own. Add to this some painfully obscure and insular British humor and the result is about as appetizing as warmed-over mutton chops.

•

When France fell, in 1940, so did the heroine of Cecil St.-Laurent's new novel Clotilde (Morrow, $4.95). Realizing she'd be separated from her boyfriend, she sneaked over to his house and crept into his bed. (She was, after all, 17, a ripe age for heroines these days.) During the next two years, no matter how rough things got, she was always ready to make the bedst of them. She made it in Vichy with Guy de Rives, Royalist agent; she made it in Paris with Jean-Marie of the Resistance; she made it in England with Gaullist Georges Lavigie (and just for kicks with a Canadian flyboy); she made it in Marseilles, and, back in Paris, again with Jean-Marie. She goofed once, when she took on Edouard, who turned out to be an informer, and was forced to watch his execution -- but soon she was off to Algiers, where she was rapturously reunited with Guy. And so it went. M. St.-Laurent (square handle: Jacques Laurent-Cely) tells the wench's tale with a skill which deserves better material, and manages to convey some of the actuality of France at war; but it still reads less like a novel than a scenario for Brigitte Bardot. We last see Clotilde on a ship headed back for France. The Captain is very kind. You guessed it: Desire under the Helm.