So Young, So False

THE NOTION OF SIN (217 pp.)--Robert McLaughin--Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

Sometimes there comes a point, even at the best-run cocktail party, when a drinker, momentarily alone in a corner, nervously jiggles the ice cubes in his glass and looks about with a glance that says unmistakably: "What am I doing here?" At that moment, the bright, articulate men sound empty and the chic, smiling women appear sad. This detached mood of mild horror is usually gone with the next drink, but Novelist McLaughlin has made it last the length of a very good short novel.

His characters are the kind whose gay yet joyless lives make for gossip over countless canapes, but they have rarely been described with such quiet precision or understanding. Some of them are merely foolish, some merely mistake manners for morals, and some merely hurt themselves by being themselves. But the most interesting of them come close to having no self to hurt; they are hollow at heart, capable of sensation but not of feeling.

Amorality. Who could seem sweeter than Joan? When she steps off the plane from Denver to meet her fiance, she looks like the all-American girl, and any bystander would guess that her soul is as spotless as her nylon underwear is sure to be. Carl Dickson, a young ad man with thoughts that seem old for his age, has decided to marry Joan because, at 26, he is already suffering from the roue's punishment: boredom with compulsive conquest, disgust with predictable passion.

But gradually, with the nagging suspense of a husband discovering a wife's infidelity from scattered clues, the reader realizes that Joan is not what she seems to be. She is, in fact, glibly promiscuous, invulnerable in her amorality. After a fashion, she has a code, and as she spells out its principles the reader will recognize in them the authentic touch of countless other Joans: any mistake is instantly righted if only one admits having made it; promiscuity is permissible if only it is covered with the illusion of being in love. In short, Joan is "a girl who feels nothing and wants everything."

Irresponsibility. For a while, Carl and Joan cling to each other in a sort of unprincipled camaraderie: up to a point, Carl shares her lazy indifference to consequences, her pretty-eyed irresponsibility toward everyone, including oneself. But in the end, he makes his break. Along the way, Author McLaughlin (A Short Wait Between Trains, The Side of the Angels) again and again pierces his story with small but sharply accurate insights--how a man feels when he pointlessly watches a girl on the street, the horribly impersonal service in a funeral parlor almost too antiseptic to admit the image, "dust to dust." Sex itself ends in the kind of disgust that makes both the scene and the act seem like an aspect of earned punishment.

McLaughlin, a journalist as well as a novelist (he is an associate editor of TIME), has an unerring eye for the Manhattan landscape, a faithful ear for the speech of the superficially smart. Although he never preaches, and the explicit statement of his theme never rises above the pitch of party talk, the reader is not allowed to forget the book's title; it would be a different story if any of the characters really had a notion of sin.

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