Books: New Fiction

TOWER IN THE WEST, by Frank Norris (362 pp.; Harper: $3.95), proves once again that imitating J. P. Marquand is tricky business. The danger: instead of capturing the hypnotic quality of Marquand's even-tempered prose, the writer may find he has only reproduced Marquand's low emotional pulsebeat. In this 1957 Harper Prize Novel, Author Frank Norris* does not quite get out of this Marquandary. His hero, George Hanes, is cut to the Marquand measure; he is an Ivy Leaguer (Princeton '01), a professional man (architect), unhappily married, and an ineffectual struggler against the leg irons of convention. But he is also a man of such insufferable nobility as to invite repeated kicks in the pants.

George gets them. His trials begin with the sudden death of his talented older brother Jeff, who had designed and built the Tower in the West, one of the first skyscrapers in St. Louis. Six months after the fatal accident, George learns that his brother's widow is pregnant by another man. To protect Jeff's good name, he marries her and breaks the heart of true-blue Margaret Carton, who has been patiently waiting for his proposal. George now proceeds to mishandle the affairs of his stepchildren, loses control of his brother's monumental Tower in the West, is chivied out of a lucrative partnership, and is rejected as "too unsavory" for a professorship at Princeton.

Somehow, it all results in a happy ending, and on the way there, the reader passes a raffish gallery of secondary characters: the Ivy League gangster, Junie Neidlinger; the Boy Scout Congressman, John Kaffey; the carnival hustler, Chick Samstag (who was so cynical that "the failure of tomorrow's sunrise would not have astonished him"). But Author Norris writes with more love of buildings than of people. Rhapsodies to the 20-story "thing of beauty" created by Jeff Hanes run murmurously through the book, and the Tower, though defaced by the years and its occupants, never becomes as caitiff or craven as the people who live from its earnings. Sometimes the book's human characters seem as lifeless as statuary against the soaring and vital affirmations built from steel and concrete.

COUNT ROLLER SKATES, by Thomas Sancton (383 pp.; Doubleday, $3.95), whizzes its screwball hero right through the mentally sound barrier. "Count Casimir Poliatoffsky" poses as a Polish nobleman and simultaneously claims to be descended from the Maya gods and the lost tribes of Israel, but he is actually half-Mexican. He once flopped as the star of a roller-skating show in Italy. Now he is a skilled grease monkey in a ship's engine room, and this uneven, offbeat first novel begins when one of the count's shipmates takes him home for dinner on a shore leave in New Orleans in the early 1900s. The shipmate's sister Hilda, an ash-blonde icicle, melts visibly before the zany hothead. Casimir soon spills his top secret: he is a "Divinely Separated person" who has found a "Unifying Purpose" that will give the human race a healthy substitute for war. "That Unifying Purpose," he says, "has got to have a ritual, a symbolism, an exercise, some world-wide activity that is simple and joyful and harmless. And in a lifetime of searching, I have yet to find an activity that surpasses roller-skating!"