Books: Also Current: Sep. 4, 1964

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A SINGLE MAN by Christopher Isherwood. 186 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.

In Berlin in the '30s, watching Sally Bowles salute the morning with raw eggs and gin, he smiled sadly, "I am a camera." There was no question of love or hate, of reaction; the sensitive recording device functioned, but the rest of the apparatus was missing. Years later in California, that boneyard for aging British intellectuals, Isherwood's camera still clicks away. Its subjects are less often street scenes than the landscapes of the mind, but the limiting flaw persists. The camera now surveys a middle-aged British homosexual, a professor of literature whose roommate has been killed in an auto accident. This deprivation has no meaning, for George is only a faint thickening in the midst of the world's loneliness. The expression of his isolation is this fictional record of a day, from matutinal stool to nocturnal masturbation. It is not a plea, only a series of impressions on the silvered surface of a film.

AN. INFINITY OF MIRRORS by Richard Condon. 333 pages. Random House. $5.95.

Richard Condon's apocalyptic pocketa-pocketa has produced a resplendent collection of giants, ogres and drowsy princesses, all flimsily disguised as people. They reappear in this grim foray into Hitler-corrupted Germany, but the author of The Manchurian Candidate has turned from dismayed humor to dismaying homily. Condon's current princess is an enormously wealthy, unbelievably beautiful Frenchwoman; though Jewish, she is married to a monocle-twirling Prussian general who cannot see the evil of Hitler until their adored child dies in a Jewish concentration camp. They retaliate by consigning the guilty SS officer to a grisly fate. However, the novel does not keep its implicit promise to find meaning in mankind's acquiescence in evil. Worse, Condon's stylistic limitations, which hardly matter in a farce, cripple a serious novel. As an old Hollywood press agent and the possessor of a considerable comic talent, he should recall the studio adage that messages are for Western Union.

HERE GOES KITTEN by Roberf Cover. 184 pages. Grove. $3.95.

The heroine of Robert Gover's One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding wa Kitten, a 14-year-old Negro prostitute with sharp claws, bite and goofy charm In this inevitable sequel, Kitten is a much tamer puss. Taking her—and himself—too seriously, Author Gover hai decided to preach as well as to profit Readers will be forgiven if they decide by page 75 that it has all been a $3.95 misunderstanding.