The Black Prince

HIDE FOX, AND ALL AFTER by RAFAEL YGLESIAS 203 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

It is not often that a writer sees his main character as clearly and directly as Rafael Yglesias sees Raul, the precocious 14-year-old who bombs out of private school in this brief and crystalline first novel. The author avoids displays of virtuosity, the pleasures of romantic posturing, and all other possible uses of fiction except this one: to watch with great care a being who fascinates him. The steadiness and detachment of his view would be remarkable in any case, but are truly astonishing for a writer who was exactly 15 years old when he wrote the novel.

Raul is a good subject, a tangle of immaturities held together by intelligence. He hides as much of the jumble as he can behind a pose that is half self-satire. The "Black Prince," as he calls himself in mockery, is a mannered, deadly literary duelist who slices fellow students and blundering adults into home fries with razor-edged misquotations. The Black Prince is a devilish smoker of cigarettes and a virgin, who is torn between self-disgust at this fault and contempt for the mawkishness of teen-age passion.

As the novel begins, Raul sits in a beanery in The Bronx, near the Cabot School, wrapped in a satisfying combination of doom and glory. He is preparing to cut classes for the tenth straight day. Fascinated classmates crowd round to be recognized or snubbed, as black-princely honor requires. Expertly--he is practiced at this--Raul builds his mood from their reactions. He must have theater. Alec, a worldly friend, asks why Raul has dressed in black. "I'm in mourning for my life," he replies. "Who is that from?" asks Alec, a bit off balance. "Chekhov," says Raul. "Ah, yes. But what play?" says Alec, recovering nicely. " 'The Sea Gull, I think. Yes, definitely, The Sea Gull.' He knew damn well it was The Sea Gull. But the footwork was marvelous."

Not all that marvelous, but the author (surprisingly, considering his age) sees this. When Yglesias sets down Raul's dilemma, which is how to keep well-intentioned authority from marking his mind before it can grow an adequate protective shell, he does it without the self-pity that might be expected of a young writer. His Raul is induced to return to school temporarily, where he performs brilliantly as Rosencrantz in a production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Rosencrantz is more or less his role in life at the moment.

Comparisons with The Catcher in the Rye are inevitable, simply because all novels about youth in flight are still measured against Salinger's. But what such a weighing shows is chiefly that Yglesias' tone--far more detached than Salinger's--is completely his own and that Holden Caulfield would now be pushing 40. Salinger's novel is a wholly mature work. Yglesias is still capable of childish sentences. But his is a superior novel, without regard to the age of its author. In the end, when Raul has dropped out of school for good, it is hard to know whether his flight is self-preservation or self-destruction, and to the reader this matters very much.

Rafael Yglesias, now 17, readily admits Hide Fox is all but quibblingly autobiographic. "It is so close that at times it was hard to avoid writing my own name down--or rather to stop myself calling myself 'Raul' when I was talking to people." He adds, sounding very like Raul indeed: "Most of adolescence is unbelievably pretentious; yet psychologically adolescents are as complex as adults."

Yglesias was reading Dickens at age nine. Before he was 15, he had dropped out of Horace Mann, a highly regarded Bronx prep school resembling Cabot. Like his hero, he was an eager amateur actor who kept cutting classes, partly because school interfered with his writing and reading. Hide Fox owes not just its theme but the will to create if to art adolescent putting on of roles. "I very pompously told myself I was a writer at eight," he says. "Ever since then I kept a notebook and tried to keep myself writing in it. I started 200 novels, got two or three pages into each. But when I left Horace Mann I felt my back was against the wall. Fear, I guess, was what drove me to the torturous process writing really is."

He wrote most of the book in Maine, where his parents have a place, finishing it on his 16th birthday. He did not get any help from them on the book, but will shortly be in the odd position of comparing reviews with two other Yglesias novelists. His father Jose is the author of several books, including The Truth About Them (World), a just-published autobiographical novel about a Cuban-American clan. His mother Helen won this year's Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award for her first novel How She Died, which appears next month. Says Rafael: "My relationship with my parents now--it was different when I first dropped out of school--is a very friendly one. We're all in this writing thing together. It has made a great camaraderie between us."

Rafael is deeply into the role of the adolescent writer--broke, living in a tiny railroad apartment, bathtub in the kitchen, mattress on the floor. "I've got interviews every day this week. Tomorrow the New York Times, Friday Seventeen (and just in time!)." He already has a 100-page start on a longer second novel, "not so autobiographical of course." Looking back: "I was fragments of an individual floating in space. I very much wanted to be an actor; but that's even harder of access than publishing, so I don't suppose I'll ever do it now that I have this start." Then another trial role flickers into place: "--unless somebody makes me an astonishing offer."

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