Current & Various

THE FETISH AND OTHER STORIES by Alberto Moravia. 285 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95.

Alberto Moravia is one of the leading money-changers in the fashionable temple of anxiety. He specializes in counterfeit intellectual currency: man is a hopeless victim of his own technology; sex is the only natural act remaining to man; life is just awful. It was awful in Moravia's early novels (The Woman of Rome, Conjugal Love), but somehow it was described with sensuous excitement. In his recent books (The Empty Canvas, Roman Tales), the excitement has progressively decelerated, and in the present collection of 41 short stories Moravia has attained what might most charitably be described as a creative pause. His milieu is comfortable, upper-middle-class Italy. His characters are dead souls, stifled with boredom and loneliness, who wander their existential wasteland groaning under the stylish burdens of too much money, too much leisure, too little heart. The women are shallow, complacent, cruel; the men are feeble, nervous, dependent; all fritter away their lives in a little hectic experiment that the protagonists like to call love. Moravia calls it torture, but he believes it is necessary torture.

SQUEEGEE by Jack Siegel. 218 pages. Horizon Press. $4.95.

On the subway from Harlem that morning, Window Washer Benny Robinson and the Negro girl on the next strap had been rubbing against each other happily--when a sudden stop threw her against a middle-aged white man, whom she accused of improper advances. Funny thing, it was the same white man Benny punched in the eye in the race incident a few hours later. And the same man again whom Benny found sitting behind the desk when he applied for a job that afternoon. Now that same night, in whose fancy home had Benny's wife just gone to work as a maid? Small world. New York, just full of coincidence. Small book, this lurid first novel, which overworks coincidence, seduction and dialect ("What-chou all want?") to prove that sex is the squeegee of tension, "the instrument that wipes the wet dirt from the window." Asks a middle-aged woman in a symbolic parlor scene, "Don't we all get just a little squeegeed?" Anyone who pays $4.95 for this book is bound to agree.

THE FLAG by Robert Shaw. 290 pages. Harcourt & World. $4.95.

The actor-author has been a tradition in England since the days of Actor William Shakespeare. Unfortunately, Actor Robert Shaw (The Luck of Ginger Coffey, The Physicists) seems to be a one-profession man. He has produced two moderately successful novels, but his third demonstrates forcefully that he is no kin to G. B. Shaw, much closer to J. Arthur Rank. The time is 1925. A reforming village vicar preaches socialism from his pulpit, flaunts a Communist flag in his church. To his cause the radicals rally: the emancipated lady of the manor, her fuddledly Fabian aunt, a brainy Etonian atheist. The conservatives conspire to destroy him: a local coal baron imports a Fascist type to incite a riot, storm the church, and tear down the offensive flag. Three people are accidentally slaughtered in the melee. At the fade, the vanquished vicar covers the corpses and, raising his fist toward heaven, apparently curses God. Sound implausible? Author Shaw assures readers in a foreword that his story is based on fact. Somehow, what with his ponderous verbosity, irrational shifts of style, difficulties with grammar and punctuation, he makes the reader confident that it didn't really happen.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.