NEW FICTION LIST

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34047, 10 January 1976, Page 8

NEW FICTION LIST

The Bottom Line. By Fletcher Knebei. Hodder and Stoughton. 403 pp. N.Z. price $9.70. Office politicking often makes compulsive novels and Fletcher Knebei has invented a board-room intrigue on the grand scale. The scene is a Mexican conference centre, where leaders of one of the world’s largest mult i-national companies are celebrating their 20th anniversary. It turns out to be five days of parties and intrigue, sexual encounters and directoral back-stabbing, with a kidnapping and a rescue thrown in. The book is easy to read and easy to forget, but it is hard to put down while Mr Knebel’s spell lasts. Sun Child. By Angela Huth Collins. 253 pp. N.Z. price $6.20. It is difficult these days to tel! the story of the gradual break-up of a marriage with any freshness of method or insight. Equally difficult is to write a novel from a child’s point of view without becoming mawkish or sentimental. Angela Huth, author of two outstanding earlier novels, “Nowhere Girl” and “Virginia Flv is Drowning,” has rashly attempted both these things in her third book, and against the odds has triumphantly succeeded in both tasks. Although told in the third person the book’s narrative is confined exclusively to the knowledge and ability to comprehend of its 10-year-old central character. Emily Harris The novel is beautifully written, bubbling with life and fun yet with the threatening undercurrent of sadness. The Untouchable Juli. By James Aldridge. Michael Joseph. 256 pp. N.Z. price $9.30. Al! James Aldridge’s previous novels. though very different in subject and theme, bear witness to the fact that he is a skilled and accomplished writer. This latest novel, “The Untouchable Juli” cannot but add to his reputation. Set in a small Australian bush town in the “choking complicated years of the 19305” the book gives a powerful portrayal both of the remote central character, Juli Cristol, and of the all too present bigotry of the town. The story is told by the man who in boyhood was Juli’s only friend and his constantly rebuffed attempts to get closer to’ Juli are related with an exasperated concern which is shared by the reader. This is a most powerful and moving novel in which the author has drawn all his material together to weave a tale that leaves the reader shaken with regret at the waste of talent and at the power of ignorance and bigotry. Living Room. By Sol Stein. Bodley Head. N.Z. price $7.70. It seems inevitable that a book about the American world of advertising must be as slick and superficial as the images created in that wish-fulfilment fantasy of fantasia. Place a 28-year-old Shirley Harman — an ambitious, intelligent girl in New York — in the executive suites, and immediately she starts talking in brilliant repartee, and coming ip with an “in-depth”

understanding of what the pub lie really wants in consumer goods. Shirley’s love-affairs are scored by the efficiency and number of orgasms her partner gives her. There is an attempt to give greater meaning to her life because her mother died when she was small, and she has always wanted to prove to her father how she could be as worth while as a son. But this sub-plot does not develop. At the end there is only regret that women's liberation should mean only freedom to move in a world of men w here a catchy jingle at the centre of an advertising campaign expresses eterna truth. Family Units. By Ruth Finch. Michael Joseph. N.Z. price $9.20. Twenty years ago prominent American Jewish writers were publishing books of life on .Millionaire Row with its boozing and whoring and cold business assignations. Gradually America, with its divorces and disturbed families looked with envy at the solid Jewish relationships between adults. particulars parents anc children. Then the writers examined their beginnings in their Jewish families. This became a popular theme symbolising anything from idealised, romanticised warmth and belonging to the cloying, castrating atmosphere of the over-dominant mother and passive father. In "Family Units” Ruth Finch an Englishwoman, follws the same tradition. Her death seems to cut off a small talent before full development took place. The story is of three adult children in an English-Jewish family with a widowed mother trying hard to hold on to any crumbs of expression of affection in her daughters. The son is, as is typical in such novels, confused in his sexuality and masculinity but has all the potential of a future conservative Jewish paterfamilias. Endless Race. By Ursula Holden. London Magazine Editions. N.Z. price $8.70. Ursula Holden’s first novel is competent but boring; “Endless Race” scarcely describes the pace at which the story moves. There are some surprisingly well realised things in the book, however, for instance the scenes of oppressive isolated childhood. The story concerns the relationship of sister and younger brother, middleclass children of an Indian army officer whom they pretty well never see and who soon dies, leaving them orphaned. Pauline’s hatred for her brother is an intrinsic part of her nature, but gradually she becomes emotionally dependent on him. She is a rathe unlikeable character and since she is the pivot on which the story so to speak swings, this is a pity. Her brother Godfrey, a respectable young doctor, despises and is embarrassed by her, and Pauline too seems to despise herself and her promiscuous drifting existence in London.

Eventually she settles down with Jock, her social inferior, and there arcpredictable scenes which establish their different origins.