Good Money, Bad Novel

BLACK FOUNTAINS (374 pp.)--Oswald Wynd--Doubleday ($2.75).

It has become almost a truism that the fattest U.S. publishers' prizes go to poor novels. Resting firmly in this tradition, Black Fountains has won its author $20,000 and the publicity tub-thumping that is sure to go with it. The business, if not the literary, reasons for its selection seem fairly obvious. It is an "inside" novel about Japan from 1938 to 1945, and it has a Japanese heroine who is both "modern" and curvy.

Young (33) Author Wynd was born in Tokyo of Scottish (Baptist missionary) parents, was thus a Japanese citizen as well as a British subject. He lived in Tokyo until he was 18. Then he went to high school in Atlantic City, to the University of Edinburgh, and wound up in Malaya as a British intelligence officer with the Indian Army. The next time he saw Japan was as a prisoner of war. He started his novel in Bibai Prison Camp.

Though Wynd obviously should know Japan at firsthand, Black Fountains reads as though it might have been written in a U.S. public library. The characters are stock and wooden, fitted out with set speeches: Heroine Omi with her U.S. education, her once-liberal parents who have swallowed the new Japanese nationalist ideology, the old housekeeper turned spy. Wynd also spells out a message: there are lots of good Japanese but they cannot effectively buck the bad ones. Says Heroine Omi: "God grant that the Americans see this! . . . This country has to be cleaned. We haven't the strength for it ourselves. They must! Give them the courage to use their terrible power!"

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