Short Notices

THE TALENT SCOUT, by Remain Gary (209 pp.; Harper; $3.75), is a potboiler with a difference. The difference is the devil. Not that he ever appears, but he is at the heart of a readable but contrived political allegory which talented Novelist Gary (The Roots of Heaven, Lady L) could have written only in a state of boredom. Gary's Faust is Jose, a South American adventurer who figures that if he is bad enough, the devil will see that he makes good. Relatively ordinary vices (pimping, incest) do not seem to work, but when he turns to politics, the devil makes him dictator. For all his new-found power, Jose still admires only talent, and he has a collection of great talents on the way to perform in his privately owned nightclub--a Billy Graham-type U.S. evangelist, a Cuban lad whose only skill is sexual proficiency, a cynical ventriloquist. Author Gary manages to have his way about the failure of the U.S.

to comprehend South American problems.

He has his fun with talented people whose only god is their narrow talent. And he even makes the devil seem a doubtful presence. But only once does he manage to sound like Remain Gary: "An idealist is a son-of-a-bitch who thinks that the earth is not a good enough place for him." THE MAN-EATER OF MALGUDI, by R. K.

Naroyan (250 pp.; Viking; $3.95), is a very funny book that generates the driest kind of laughter about man, that figure of serious fun. The story's uncertain hero is a printer in a small Indian town who bats out jobs on an ancient press but finds his real pleasure in running a kind of literary salon whose major figures are an unpublished poet and a jobless journalist. Slam-bang into his nerveless world crashes a huge, careless taxidermist, a man who is physically powerful and morally indifferent. He moves in on the printer, pays no rent, entertains the town whores, and laughs his unpaid, gentle landlord into inconsequence. Just when the reader is beginning to ask why the mild printer has to take all this, Author Narayan--himself a Hindu, a vegetarian, and a small, mild fellow--shows that the meek have their own kind of strength.

THE ANNALS OF LOGAN, by Robert Graham (216 pp.; Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $4.95), is the latest wrinkle in Organization Man books, and one from which the genre may never recover. As to plot, characters and tone, it is an ordinary anti-business novel: somebody sleeps with somebody's secretary, somebody is fired ruthlessly, somebody else goes mad. The only innovation Author Graham has introduced is that he writes the whole thing in verse, of sorts. Everyone at Cross Automatic Controls is meant to have his own meter, but the main differences between the characters lie in typography: the president speaks in big square blocks, the advertising man in short, jagged lines. Jim Smalley, assistant director of sales promotion, has perhaps the most arresting-looking pattern: am a conformist (they say}--/ love what I think they think I should; I am doing just what is expected Oh God, let them notice me draw upon me fully I so so want to rise.

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