Books: Summer Fiction

(3 of 3)

The protagonist, a young teacher named Phil Hatcher, is a compulsive player of horses, poker, craps — any ritual of chance on which he can stake his life or his rent money. His marriage goes, his career more or less disintegrates, but the "action" remains. Gambling — worked at, lovingly labored over, the Morning Telegraph studied with a Talmudic precision — becomes the last pure arena of sheer individualistic intellect: the mind in combat with the odds. Guetti's scenes at Aqueduct and Monmouth Park, at craps tables and poker parties, have a tense authenticity. Thousands of dollars roll in and out with a blind, tidal rhythm. Meantime, Hatcher's wife, already effectively widowed, drifts off to find a life outside of her husband's elaborate and demanding fantasies.

Perhaps because he is a gambler himself, Author Guetti provides Hatcher with a complete metamorphosis from professor to high roller. When last seen he is heading south in a Cadillac for more action.—Lance Morrow

THE PRIVATE SECTOR

by JOSEPH HONE

314 pages. Dutton. $7.95.

This stylish thriller is yet another stop on the Greene-Ambler-Deighton-LeCarre circuit. In his first novel, Dublin-born Joseph Hone follows the impeccable existentialist formula in which the spy is the victim, doomed to suffer betrayals and failures as remote as the stars from his control.

For Peter Marlow trouble begins when London sends him to Cairo to find another British agent, named Henry Edwards, who has mysteriously disappeared. Unknown to Marlow, of course, Edwards is actually a triple agent (Moscow as well as London and Cairo), and Cairo's omniscient Colonel Hamdy is determined to kill Edwards because Hamdy is himself a triple agent (Tel Aviv too). The Israelis have tipped Colonel Hamdy that Edwards is about to expose all their spies in Cairo, but they got that tip from Edwards' own boss in London, who is also, inevitably, still another Soviet agent. And so on.

Confusing? Yes. No connoisseur of the genre would accept less. Yet the best parts of Hone's espionage novel have nothing to do with espionage. His hero, far from being the traditional gun-and-karate spy, is a mournful reincarnation of the wandering Irishman, someone whose way of escaping from Egypt is to hitch a ride on a Land Rover with an Anglican clergyman who is setting off with beagle-like optimism to expand the parish in the Saharan sands around Tobruk.

Best of all, Hone provides a portrait of Nasser's Cairo that occasionally reads like updated Lawrence Durrell —a city of dusty cricket fields and sweet coffee and the khamsin rustling the jacaranda trees, a city in which the revolutionary press censor plays badminton on the roof of his apartment house and keeps a suffragi downstairs to retrieve the stray shuttlecocks from the streets below.—Otto Friedrich