Books: Viennese Valse Macabre

EVERY MAN A MURDERER by Heimito von Doderer. 373 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

A novel by Vienna's Heimito von Doderer is rather like an Eames chair draped with an antimacassar. In their opulent detail, his scenes suggest those leisurely Victorian sagas in which the reader can hardly see the plot for the potted ferns. Beneath the surface clutter, however, a psychological novelist of power and perception is at work.

Though he is Austria's most eminent novelist, Von Doderer did not become widely known in the U.S. until 1961 with The Demons, the half-million-word novel of Austria in the '20s that occupied him off and on for 25 years. In Every Man a Murderer, written in the late '30s, Von Doderer returns to the same time and place. His fatalistic thesis is plainly stated in the first lines: "Everyone's childhood is plumped down over his head like a bucket. The con tents of this bucket are at first unknown.

But throughout life, the stuff drips down on him slowly—and there's no sense changing clothes or costumes, for the dripping will continue."

The bucket in this case is worn by Conrad Castiletz, an upper-middle-class Viennese businessman whose ordered life is shattered by the death of a woman he has never met. After a lonely, long-drawn adolescence, Conrad becomes an exceptionally promising young executive in a textile firm, and he marries the daughter of one of its owners. Then he sees a portrait of his wife's beautiful younger sister and hears the story of her apparent murder, eight years earlier, in a locked, private compartment of a Stuttgart-bound express. Several suspects were questioned, but no arrest had ever been made.

The case so intrigues Castiletz that he sets out to solve it himself. He talks to people who remember the sister, to the police inspector who handled the case, to one of the former suspects. The investigation occupies all of his weekends and gradually all of his evenings as well. His neglected wife drifts into an affair with a handsome ski instructor. But to Castiletz it soon seems as if the events on the night of the murder are the only reality; that "everything else during the long subsequent years had in fact been piled-up rubble concealing his true life." When he finds out at last how the death occurred, he suddenly loses what has become his only reason for living. He dies in an accident that may have been a suicide.

As a study of mental collapse, Every Man is often impressive. But Novelist Von Doderer weakens his book by overloading it with biographical and clinical detail. The result is more case history than novel: the fever chart of childhood has dictated a whole life.