Books: Grace Among the Roaches

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THE TENANTS OF MOONBLOOM by Edward Lewis Wallant. 245 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $4.50.

Edward Lewis Wallant died of a stroke last year at 36, bequeathing a truly horrifying human map of Manhattan's lower depths. His third novel, The Tenants of Moonbloom, is a chart of misery in the tenements, and his hero (surely the first of his kind in the long history of fiction) is a rent collector.

Wallant's people are the walking wounded and unofficial dead of the affluent society. They inhabit what is known in officialese as "substandard housing," but they are figures in a land scape of hell. Wallant writes with lyrical affection of falling plaster, the colors of linoleum, the awful caprice of electrical fixtures, and the ebb and flow of cruel plumbing. He sniffs the eternal odors of poverty, sin and despair on stairway, landing and daybed. The flaking walls about his creatures are a barometer of the damp weather in the soul. His theme is the pursuit of grace among the abounding roaches.

Shared Burden. Norman Moonbloom is "New York's most educated rent collector," with degrees from Wisconsin, McGill, Mexico and Bowdoin. His heart, if anywhere, is in his boots as he trudges each week through the Lower East Side and Yorkville to collect rent in cash and to issue promises that some thing (the toilet, the walls, the fusebox, or whatever) will be fixed. It never is.

Heaving at the handle of an ashcan, his aide Gaylord, a Negro janitor, asks: "What do you know of the black man's burden?" Moonbloom responds sourly, as he picks up the other handle: "I share it."

But Norman's trouble is that he shares nothing and therefore is nothing. Each week he knocks on door after door and each opens on scenes where something terrible and unexplained is going on. Bleakly Norman observes, but will not allow himself to become implicated in the lives of the pitiable and terrible people from whom he exacts tribute. He sees them not as people but as "characters" in an anecdote, grotesque figures in a puppet theater.