Grace Among the Roaches

THE TENANTS OF MOONBLOOM by Edward Lewis Wallant. 245 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $4.50.

Edward Lewis Wallant died of a stroke last year at 36, bequeathing a truly horrifying human map of Manhattan's lower depths. His third novel, The Tenants of Moonbloom, is a chart of misery in the tenements, and his hero (surely the first of his kind in the long history of fiction) is a rent collector.

Wallant's people are the walking wounded and unofficial dead of the affluent society. They inhabit what is known in officialese as "substandard housing," but they are figures in a land scape of hell. Wallant writes with lyrical affection of falling plaster, the colors of linoleum, the awful caprice of electrical fixtures, and the ebb and flow of cruel plumbing. He sniffs the eternal odors of poverty, sin and despair on stairway, landing and daybed. The flaking walls about his creatures are a barometer of the damp weather in the soul. His theme is the pursuit of grace among the abounding roaches.

Shared Burden. Norman Moonbloom is "New York's most educated rent collector," with degrees from Wisconsin, McGill, Mexico and Bowdoin. His heart, if anywhere, is in his boots as he trudges each week through the Lower East Side and Yorkville to collect rent in cash and to issue promises that some thing (the toilet, the walls, the fusebox, or whatever) will be fixed. It never is.

Heaving at the handle of an ashcan, his aide Gaylord, a Negro janitor, asks: "What do you know of the black man's burden?" Moonbloom responds sourly, as he picks up the other handle: "I share it."

But Norman's trouble is that he shares nothing and therefore is nothing. Each week he knocks on door after door and each opens on scenes where something terrible and unexplained is going on. Bleakly Norman observes, but will not allow himself to become implicated in the lives of the pitiable and terrible people from whom he exacts tribute. He sees them not as people but as "characters" in an anecdote, grotesque figures in a puppet theater.

Giants & Hunchbacks. As rent payers and characters they can be listed as follows: a Chinese-American sexual athlete whose language is that of a manic beatster; a spry 104-year-old Russian giant who sees himself as a Jewish Ahab among cockroaches the size of whales; two jazz musicians who rave like Catskill comics; Use, a beautiful blonde ex-functionary of a German concentration camp, haunted, as well she may be, by a prevalence of Jews; a gruesome couple who can make love only when the beaded lady has been reduced to tears: a language teacher obsessed by the purity of Italian vowels and his own intestinal tract; a hunchbacked retoucher of photographs who has emptied his apartment and life of anything that might cause disorder; a loud lumberjacketed poetry-spouting type who spends his days off from teaching school bullying his bewildered son into games of touch football: a retired pharmacist and his tarty daughter whom he treats like Shirley Temple; a madly eloquent candy butcher on the New Haven line "whose sounds of humor are cumulatively a dirge": and a colored novelist, "sick of Niggerdom," who is trying to write himself out of the "United States of Some Americans" and who defiantly calls himself "just a wholesome American faggot" symbolically castrated by "the South." All these are cartoons, but cartoons done with the vivid life of a master who has scrawled a sketch on the back of a menu. Wallant has been praised halfheartedly for his "realism," but his vision of life under the skirts of the skyscrapers is realistic only in the sense of an anatomical chart cut away to show the moving parts. His people wear their livers on their sleeves.

No one since Nathanael West has written better of the rootlessness of metropolitan life. West is a writer whom Wallant resembles not only in his untimely death after early brilliant promise, but for his special Jewish sensibility and the profound moral concern beneath the cynical surface glitter of the words. Wallant had what he calls "the ear of the eye"; his creatures speak in a hundred voices, each one peculiarly appropriate to his character.

Close to Faith. Wallant's novel becomes a story only when his hero Moonbloom becomes involved in the spectacle, and the rent collector pays his own dues to humanity. From being a "circumcised Uriah Heep," as one of his tenants sees him, or as another sees him, "a man who could watch a murder committed and just smile a goofy little dirt-eating smile," he becomes a tragic actor in a theater of farce. He makes love for the first time (with the false Shirley Temple type), he weeps at a funeral, he comforts a frustrated suicide. In a burst of manic moral energy, the rent collector begins to spend all his time painting, rewiring and replumbing his houses of despair.

As Moonbloom leaves his false vocation as rent collector, he utters his faith--"Love, Courage and Delusion." It is close enough to Faith, Hope and Charity to be true, and not a bad legacy for a great talent like Wallant's to leave the world.

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