Books: Short Notices: Apr. 29, 1966

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SHADOW OF MY BROTHER by Davis Grubb. 317 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $5.95.

By way of showing that Davis Grubb (The Night of the Hunter, The Voices of Glory) is a serious writer, his publishers have printed excerpts from a personal journal that he kept while writing this book. Sample entries: "One page done. I can't see! I can't hear! God!" "Something is dying in me to make this book live on paper." Unfortunately, Grubb was unable to keep such anguished hyperbole confined to his journal. It gushes throughout the book, which is about the lynch-murder of a Negro boy in a small Southern town. At its best, Grubb's imagery is impressive and his prose is lyrical. But his uncontrolled bombast, his near-hysterical characters, and his determination to leave no grit unhominized often make the cliché-ridden novel read like a bad parody.

MOTHER NIGHT by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 202 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.

Mother Night was first published as a 350 paperback in 1962. Its appearance now in hardcover, reversing the usual procedure, can be regarded as an amusement tax chargeable to the author's growing reputation as a satirist. Vonnegut's targets are institutional: religion (Cat's Cradle), science and technology (Player Piano), philanthropy (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine). Here the target appears to be patriotism. From Nazi Germany, Howard W. Campbell Jr. broadcasts Hitler's propaganda to the West. Even his wife does not know that he is a U.S. counter-intelligence agent and that he is transmitting valuable military information. But after the war, the U.S. military establishment disowns him. After keeping this secret for 15 cataleptic years, Howard hardly believes it himself, and surrenders to stand trial in Israel as a war criminal. At length Washington relents, and Howard is freed. Yet freedom is the last thing he wants. A private hero and a public traitor, a pawn sacrificed to patriotism, he sentences himself to death "for crimes against himself." Author Vonnegut's writing style is a long way from Parnassus; the satire sometimes vanishes in polemic.

WHITE HOUSE NANNIE: MY YEARS WITH CAROLINE AND JOHN KENNEDY JR. by Maud Shaw. 205 pages. New American Library. $4.95.

"My experiences are better kept to myself," declared English-born Maud Shaw when she left the service of the Kennedy family last summer. Unsurprisingly, she has changed her mind. Her little trickle into the flood of Kennediana includes some nursery-level characterizations of the children (John is "the clown . . . a natural comic," while Caroline, like her mother, is "the quieter, more reserved of the two, slow to make friends") and a few intriguing anecdotes. There was, for example, the time when Caroline first became aware of people's color. Once she noticed that she was turning brown in the sun at Palm Beach. "George," she asked a Negro servant, "how did you get that color? I've been in the sun all day and I'm only a bit brown." "Well, Miss," George confided, "I've been lying in the sun all my life, I guess." After that, writes Shaw, Caroline "never asked another question about the subject."