From the recent fiction lists

Press, 11 August 1979, Page 17

From the recent fiction lists

Hey, Doll Face. By Deborah Hautzig. Hamish Hamilton, 1979. 151 pp. $8.50.

There is a first time for every 15-year-old girl to come to puberty. It must be a unique experience for each in turn — confusing, mysterious and a little frightening. Suddenly one’s body is viewed, as if by a spectator, as going through some sort of strange transformation, no matter what the child’s will, and the mind similarly is penetrated by showers of thoughts barely glimpsed before they soak away into oblivion.

The author, just in her twenties, looks back on a few months of her life when she met a girlfriend at a new school. Slightly feverish from encounters with inept lads and guiltily fumbling older men, the fondness between the two girls becomes tinged with distinct physical, sexual overtones. Even in the permissive climate of New York in the seventies, growing up in liberal families, the two girls develop guilt and anxiety at their possible sexual deviation, until they are able once more to fit it into its appropriate perspective. A quiet book which, without dramatics, deals with a phase of the girls’ new vision on a world that suddenly seems to be sparkling with dew and moving on to normal and hopefully satisfactory womanhood. This book would be

particularly good reading for a slightly introverted 15-year-old girl and her parents. — Ralf Unger.

Tunes for a Small Harmonica. By Bar- ■ bara Vfersba. Bodley Head, 1979. 178 pp. $9.20.

t Jacqueline Frances McAllister (“J.F.") is 16, has very rich parents and regular appointments with a psychoanalyst, lives in New York, and dresses to look like a boy, a “very young Steve McQueen”. Most of her time is taken up inventing fantasies about her (male) poetry teacher, and busking on the sidewalks with her mouth-organ. She also reads furiously a variety of psychological literature to provide her with dreams and symptoms so that her analyst can be kept happy. “Small Harmonica” is a gem of a book, a teen-age view of life in the city with hardly a hint of violence, racial tension, or any of the other horrors which most writers believe must be attached to New York. It is also a tale of awakening, of the erosion of the illusions and sharp perceptions of childhood. In a couple of unexpected asides, “J.F.” also manages to put New Zealand in its place, the most remote imaginable from the centre of her universe. The most unlikely book she manages to find in the library is called “The

Homosexual in New Zealand”, and when she becomes alarmed at the amount she is spending on taxi fares she lectures herself that she has spent enough to pay her fare to emigrate to New Zealand. — NAYLOR HILLARY.

Goodbye, Un-America. By James Aldridge. Michael Joseph, 1979. 157 pp. $11.95.

Pip Lovell and Lester Terrada, two American friends of very different backgrounds, endlessly debate their opposing views of their country and countrymen. They become advisers to President Roosevelt. Then, as the evil of McCarthyism sweeps the country, Terrada responds to an inquiry into his own “Americanism” by denouncing his friend.

Both men had competed for the affections of the girl who eventually became Pip Lovell’s wife. When Lovell flees to France to escape McCarthyist persecution, Judy abandons him for the man she sees as the winner. Much later Terrada, dying of cancer, comes to France seeking Lovell’s forgiveness for his betrayal — yet strangely oblivious, still, of the extent of the damage he has done, and of the attitudes of those he has hurt.

Aldridge has ably captured the taste of the era, and its impact on the lives of those who lived through it. His short novel succeeds in mirroring a

country’s agonies. in its individual characters. The result is a readable and thought-provoking story. — A. J. Petre.

The Nostradamus Traitor. By John Gardner. Hodder and Stoughton. 279 pp. $12.80.

Sowing dissension between Hitler and the SS by feeding both of them “doctored” Nostradamus prophecies was a clever idea. But the thread of the plot became interwoven in a web of treachery which did not start to unravel until nearly 44 years later. The unravelling of the tortured strands, with long and brilliantlyexecuted flashbacks to the Second World War, is the essence of this absorbing mystery thriller. Naturally, it does not turn out quite the way anyone would have expected, but Gardner keeps the tension high all the way.

There are some irritating defects. The hero, Herbie Kruger, sits down and “builds” himself a drink so often that the affectation of the expression becomes infuriating. His reasons for the failure of Kruger’s automatic pistol at a vital moment are technically impossible. Thriller writers should be more careful. Even so “The Nostradamus Traitor” is one of the more convincing of the current crop of war thrillers. — A. J. Petre.