Middleweight & Friend

THE VIOLENT WEDDING (255 pp.]--Robert Lowry--Doubleday ($3).

"You just never saw a great fighter," her sportswriter friend tells Laine Brendan. "I'm going to take you to see one tonight." That night, in Madison Square Garden, Laine Brendan sees Middleweight Paris ("Baby") James for the first time. For Baby, the fight is just a routine affair, won by a knockout. But Laine's emotions come to life as she watches the Negro boxer "fighting his fight with a savage grace . . . like the black angel of death himself." After the fight, Laine can't get the black angel out of her mind; she gets his phone number and invites him to her Greenwich Village walkup apartment.

Once Baby gets there, Novelist Robert Lowry begins mixing a thunderstorm of violence. Uncomplicated, and decidedly no bohemian, Fighter Baby figures Laine is crazy to fall in love with a "spook," as he calls himself, but he enjoys driving her around in his Cadillac and ending the evenings in her apartment. For Laine, whose heart is a haunted house crowded with the memories of a broken marriage, two other love affairs and a stumbling career as a second-rate painter, Baby is a kind of dark Galahad of the Life Force. One day when she is babbling on about the beauty of his bravery, Baby sets her straight: "You want to know the reason I'm a fighter? . . . For money. For this car and these clothes. That's all I'm in it for." But before this cold logic douses their brief affair, Laine does a portrait of Baby. She paints him bloody-faced amid a crisscross of ring ropes. "You scare me out of ten years' growth," Baby says when he sees it. "You want to get me killed." But it is Baby who does the killing, without intending it, in his next fight; and the splatter of headlines in the midnight papers about the man he killed in the prize ring puts Baby in a raw mood. He turns up at Laine's apartment and, when she resists this time, rapes her.

After that, Author Lowry throws a series of punches that glance off into melodrama and symbolism. Laine takes an overdose of sleeping pills. Baby, though a champion now, decides to quit. But compulsively he digs up Laine's old portrait of him, and it convinces him, in a way Author Lowry never makes clear, that catching a few of life's blows is no excuse for slumping to the canvas in despair. He tells his manager to book another fight. Until he sidetracks The Violent Wedding on to Baby's mind and conscience, Author Lowry keeps his fighter, his prose and his novel cannonballing along like a night express on a clear track.

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