Flashes of Dementia

MONDAY NIGHT -- Kay Boyle -- Ear-court, Brace ($2.50).

One of the few U. S. expatriate writers left in Europe is Kay Boyle, 35, Minnesota-born. Her short stories and novels still suffer from the elliptical writing that flourished in post-War Paris. They are difficult reading not because her prose is obscure, but because her characters are puzzling neurotics and she does not seem to know it.

Like her five previous novels, Monday Night is at its best in creating momentary moods of neurotic tension, in flashes of brilliant writing. Its central character is a comic grotesque called Wilt, a washed-out, oldtime, expatriate newspaperman, middleaged, garrulous, full of stories he never got around to writing. In a promising beginning, Wilt is introduced on a Paris street corner in mysterious talk with a big, naive pal named Bernie, a medical student just arrived from the Midwest in hopes of meeting his hero, a famed French toxicologist. Wilt, who had met Bernie only a few hours before, offers to arrange the meeting.

The search for the toxicologist begins in a bar, where they start drinking on empty stomachs, continues via other bars, where they pick up strange stories of the toxicologist's victims. They get involved with drunks, with the toxicologist's servants, with the wife and child of a man sentenced to life imprisonment on the toxicologist's evidence. Meantime, Wilt reels off his unwritten stories, long since ignoring poor Bernie, who whimpers because Wilt won't stop to eat, because he has been seduced and because he has lost his money. Unfortunately, the comic side of this Walpurgis Night wandering diminishes when Author Boyle endows Wilt with an intuition, inspired by drink and his own fantasies, that enables him to solve in one night a fraud which takes seven years for the law courts to see through. Modest readers, unable to figure out Kay Boyle's queer people, may be left with an uneasy sense of their own confusion; more confident readers will call the author addled.

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