Books: New Fiction

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His courtship of Hilda is punctuated by Casimir's sky-scanning Delphic queries: "Are the Life-Gods and the Fate-Gods willing?" Hilda is willing, and there is scarcely a dull moment spent with the count as he 1) sees his first roller-skating show wrecked by a storm, 2) witnesses a local bigwig being shot to death by a bordello madam, 3) two-times Hilda with a carnival doxy billed as ''Phazma the Phlame Girl." 4) has his second roller-skating show filched by a double-crossing partner, 5) goes back to the sea with visions of greater roller rinks. Obviously, Author Sancton, 41, a New Orleans newspaper man and onetime managing editor of the New Republic, intended these assorted ribbons of plot to package some large symbolic meaning. He is much better when he avoids his fuzzy cosmic fumbling and sticks to camera-eye reporting on jazz joints, brothels and the irrecoverable sights and sounds of New Orleans before World War I.