Short Notices

THE BACHELORS, by Muriel Spark (2 19 pp.; Llppincoft; $3.95), suggests that she can be the wittiest writer of English to appear since Evelyn Waugh took a vow of solemnity. The bachelors in her story are a wildly assorted lot--a barrister, an epileptic graphologist, an alcoholic art critic and a fake medium. The medium, Patrick Seton, regards the world with "pale juvenile eyes'" and is sure that he happens to be "one of those rare persons who are born to do great things and to suffer injustice and persecution."

What Patrick is suffering, as the reader is introduced to him, is a trial for extortion: he has been accused of defrauding a widow of her savings, presumably to further his spiritual work. In his predicament, virtually none of Patrick's friends have any sympathy for him. At the end only the graphologist, rendered sensitive by his illness, feels a pull of understanding for Patrick. But whether they acknowledge it or not, the bachelors all feel the kind of allegiance to one another that comes from standing outside society looking in. If there is a mystique to bachelorhood, suggests Novelist Spark, it is perhaps best symbolized in one of their most cherished tribal customs, as described by the art critic. All bachelors, he explains, urinate in sinks and washbasins.

THE ACROPHILE, by Yorom Kaniuk (182 pp.; Atheneum; $3.50), is a first novel which tells the sad story of an ambitious young man in Manhattan. He encounters a girl named Mira in Washington Square, takes her to bed and is tumultuously hustled into marriage. When Mira leaves him, he gravitates to another girl, achieves considerable public acclaim, and then collapses in self-induced, failure. At the end, he is alone with "each day melting into another in dreary, beautiful succession." But this is not all, for Israeli-born Author Kaniuk has an antic imagination and fills his short book with puzzle and paradox, gallows humor and the Gargantuan asides of Jewish legend.

His much buffeted hero, Daan, emerges unscathed from the furnace of his wife's family: the mother, whose philosophy is always to scream, "because if you scream no one will ask any questions"; the father, who loves everyone and tediously tells them so; and the four uncles named Nathan, one of whom is a prophet. Daan turns a Candide-like eye on Manhattan; coming from Israel, where every home was built yesterday, he thinks the city grey with age and ancient wisdom. But he has a charming wisdom of his own, which is expressed in the book's title. Though it derives from the Greek ("lover of heights"), it expresses an involved concept typical of Jewish skepticism: man dreams of soaring higher than Ararat, but he can seldom scale even a dunghill.

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