Books: Story of a Bad Boy

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CHARLEY Is MY DARLING (343 pp.]—Joyce Gary—Harper ($3.95).

If novelists write more successfully about bad boys than do sociologists or judges, it is because fiction need not analyze or propose solutions. The late Joyce Gary was no sociologist, no judge; he was a superb storyteller, and his portrait of misbehaving youngsters in this 1940 novel (published in the U.S. for the first time) is both sympathetic and accurate. If it lacks the weight and ironic wisdom of some of his later work (The Horse's Mouth, Herself Surprised), it nevertheless shows the famous Gary virtues: a clear and economical style, a sharp wit, and a joy in human existence.

Charley Brown is an undersized slum runner who is evacuated from London during World War II and sent with other refugees to a west-country village. At 13 or so, he has a good mind but a lousy head, and when his poll is shaved to free him from vermin, he acquires a cruel nickname. Gary was too sensible to suggest that all the boy's troubles begin when jeering ruffians call him "Lousy." But Charley tries harder than he might have done to win followers—by passing out candy and soda pop, then by stealing a car and leading an expedition to the cinema in a neighboring town.

The police let him off with a tongue-lashing, and the kindly village woman at whose house he is quartered tries hard to help Charley. The boy is good hearted and values her friendship, but it never occurs to him to stay out of trouble. He is not amoral, except from an adult viewpoint. He follows the rules of juvenile society as if they had been relayed to him by Moses, but the only forces he recognizes are the intense pressures of youthful adulation and contempt.

Charley organizes a gang of underaged cat burglars and the children blunder from success to pointless success, stealing trinkets for the excitement of it and giving them away. It is only after Charley is caught that Gary's book makes a descent into sentiment, coming closer to Dickens than to Evelyn Waugh, who also told (in his hilarious Put Out More Flags) of brattish evacuees on the loose in the English countryside. But the sentimental flaw is minor, and the book makes its point well: adolescence is a chrysalis whose occupant can be hurt, but not helped much, by the world outside.