Notable

By Christopher Porterfield, T.F., Martha Duffy

THE MALCONTENTS by C.P. SNOW 277 pages. Scribners. $6.95.

The man who fostered the notion of the Two Cultures has now encountered a third: the youth culture. Encountered, though, is not quite the word. On the evidence of The Malcontents, C.P. Snow seems to have heard about youth from a distance and caught only a faint echo. Bomb throwers? Draft dodgers? Snow's radical cell of students is exercised about a racist slumlord who happens to be an influential Tory M.P.; they are plotting to subject him to what, for the English, still seems to be the worst of fates: public exposure.

Dropouts? Cultural aliens? One of Snow's revolutionaries shows his conempt for middle-class values by not uppraiding home, the saucy servants in his parent's home, where he still lives quite comfortably. Snow hints that his young people constitute an experimental new model of human nature, expressing "not only the future of desire, but the future of fate." On closer examination, how ever, they turn out to be merely incipient Snow men, i.e., earnest, solemn, long-winded committee members. Once more, then, Snow's plot hinges on the rather academic question: Who casts a deciding vote? The answer comes with a dash of LSD and a mysterious death by defenestration. But it is delivered in a style that is not so much prose as prosaic. At the end, Snow's hero decides to get married and bore from within society. With typical felicity, he concludes: "Some feelings were simpler, compulsorily simpler, than until inside them one would ever think." Heavy, man.

--Christopher Porterfield

RED FOX by CHARLES G.D. ROBERTS 187 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $4.95.

Even when they are not despoiling the vines or eating holes in Spartan boys there is much to be said about foxes. Foxes are smart. Foxes are vulpine. Foxes have pointy noses and an air of unassailable RED FOX sagacity. There are three great books about foxes. Probably the best known is Beatrix Potter's Tale of Mister Tod, in which the protagonist proves to be fastidious but cowardly. A second, now unhappily out of print, is Alexander Sturm's The Problem Fox, a sly cartoon biography of a precocious animal named August who solves food mazes and learns to spell his name. Canadian Writer-Poet-Naturalist Sir Charles G.D. Roberts' Red Fox, written in 1905 and often reprinted, is the third.

It is a Bildungsroman about a fox in the backwoods of New Brunswick.

Roberts is lightly anthropomorphic. But his extraordinary knowledge, affection and descriptive powers irresistibly transform any sympathetic reader over nine into a fox, then turn him loose in the woods to foil dogs, fight with black snakes, chase partridges caught under a crusted snow and escape a forest fire.

As a gentleman of the old school, Sir Charles is properly discreet about vixens, but Red Fox does raise a family of more or less ungrateful pups.

--T.F.

RUNNING SCARRED by TEX MAULE 215 pages. Saturday Review Press. $6.95.

This is a genial, laconic account of the road back from disaster. Six years ago, when he was 51, Tex Maule, a SPORTS ILLUSTRATED editor, had a massive heart attack. He almost died then and there, mainly because he stumbled out of bed rather than accept a bedpan and crashed into his own oxygen supply.

Two months later he was a quaking semi-invalid on a baffling quest for lost health. A rejuvenation clinic in Switzerland relieved him of $3,000 in return for implanting "unborn lamb cells," which only gave him a rash on his bottom. He went back to work, gave up cigarettes and gained 45 lbs. Finally he decided to take up running, and he credits it for his current health and vitality. He has jogged through Mexico City's zoo and over London's bridges, been bitten by dogs and insulted by children ("Hey, looka da ol geezer"). He even ran in the Boston Marathon, slightly ahead of the motorcycle cops who slowly follow the field.

Though the book may be read as a guide for the late-blooming runner, it is far more entertaining as testimony to the gray area between sickness and health, which many people inhabit but few write about. Angina, sciatica, gout and rebellious gall bladders all figure in these pages. So does booze--"several drinks at lunch and several more before dinner," which Maule coolly refuses to cut. Then there are the various doctors who were of dubious aid. Most said running would finish him off; one admitted he hadn't the faintest idea what the effect of such exercise would be. Even the publisher was wary, withholding part of the advance until publication date, in case Maule did not live that long. He collected.

--Martha Duffy

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