Mixed Fiction

LOST SUMMER, by Christopher Davis (320 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $3.95), introduces Toni Newman, who is 18, pretty, decent, and has been brought up in solid comfort by intelligent, loving parents. Yet she shouts at her shocked mother: "I'd go to bed with anybody who loved me or gave me a chance to love him. Anybody at all.''

What happened to make Toni feel that way? On a pleasant evening several weeks back, she had driven out to a nightclub with her dull but good-looking young man. Stan Walters, as described by his teen-age brother, is "the guy who goes through life and nothing happens because he keeps counting his change." On this night, really afraid of love behind his great-lover facade, Stan got hopelessly drunk. Toni, trying to get home alone, was forced into a stolen car by two young toughs, was raped, brutally beaten and thrown out.

So far, Lost Summer is simply a muted, chillingly written version of a tabloid story. Author Davis gets down to his novelist's business as Toni finds that her familiar world is steadily rotting away because of the unease felt by the people around her. An old neighbor lady whom she has known from childhood cuts her on the street. At her summer school her instructor barely disguises his leer. Her younger sister pruriently prods her with questions. And Stan Walters shifts rapidly from guilt and remorse to jealousy and suspicion, accuses her of having invited the attack. Gradually, Toni moves into a limbo beyond sanity, and begins to wonder if in some way she had not asked for what happened. At length, her puzzled and angered parents seem to join the enemy, and Toni, trying to play the role she has been assigned, is last seen in a Pullman sleeper, giving herself to a salesman who has been kind to her.

By keeping his voice down and his judgments out of this first novel, Author Davis. 29. enlists full sympathy for his victim. Though the jacket claims that his book is a blast at "contemporary Ameri can society," it is really a timeless story about two kinds of brutality: that of the criminal who hurts by not caring for the feelings of his victim, and that of the victim's loved ones who hurt even more by not caring enough.

NABOKOV'S DOZEN, by Vladimir Nabokov (214 pp.; Doubleday; $3.50), follows Lolita, the cannon shot heard round the literary world (TIME, Sept. 1), and by comparison crackles sporadically like sniper fire. But since Nabokov is an accomplished literary marksman, these short stories are on target, and several are bull's-eyes. The targets are strikingly varied: a pair of Siamese twins, each of whom must be his brother's keeper; a frustrated lepidopterist; a White Russian general playing triple agent in the Paris of the '205. The unifying theme, if there is one, is that of the heart's exile from the far country of its desires, a logical reflection of the physical exile of longtime Russian Emigre Nabokov. The uprooted, he seems to say. are more vulnerable than the rootless, for they are the victims of their memories.

In Signs and Symbols, a boy is exiled from his sanity while his parents wait helplessly for the telephone call from the sanitarium that will tell them that one of his recurrent suicide attempts has succeeded. "That in Aleppo Once . . ." tells of a Russian emigre torn from the girl he married "a few weeks before the gentle Germans roared into Paris.'' One story. First Love--"true in every detail to the author's remembered life"--links Nabokov to an episode in the life of the notorious Humbert Humbert, Lolita's nymphet-chasing hero. In the story, the narrator is smitten by a cute little nymphetease on the beach at Biarritz--but it is only a poignant little saga of puppy love quickly brought to an end by the boy's tutor. Nabokov's Dozen lacks Lolita's pun-prone pyrotechnics. But it shares with it Nabokov's fascinating gift for translating the machine-tooled commonplaces of U.S. life into a surreal landscape of fantasy, a kind of Poe-like, gadget-haunted region of Weir. Thus a soda-fountain stool violently revolves into a "tall mushroom," a newly screwed-in electric bulb lights up with "the hideous instancy of a dragon's egg hatching in one's bare hand." It is the strength of Nabokov's imagination that makes the characters in these stories live. It is the weakness of his characters that they can live only in their imaginations.

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