The Walking Zircon

By J.S.

THE SPANISH SOLDIER

by HERBERT BUCKHOLZ 344 pages. Charterhouse. $7.95.

The author's artistic and intellectual pretensions run a thrilling race with his talent through the pages of this dizzy comic novel. After being ahead for long sections of the book, talent loses out only in the last chapters. There is a certain spectator interest to this peculiar struggle (Will Buckholz really blow the whole thing? Can he possibly save anything?). Still, it is a relief when the reader--and apparently the novelist--realizes that absolutely nothing in The Spanish Soldier is to be taken seriously, not even the pretensions.

By this point, however, Buckholz's bad angel has led him into a region of formidable murk. The stated business of the novel is nothing less than a search for the Unholy Grail--the pewter cup, Buckholz imagines, from which Judas drank at the Last Supper. The searchers are Matthew Mendelsohn, a 33-year-old former New York state senator, and Lise, a moonstruck German beauty. For three years they have excavated the beaches and caves of Ibiza --Lise because she believes with the force of mania that the cup is there, Matthew because he believes serenely in nothing.

Faith. These preposterous doings are ornamented by a series of time displacements and truth warps in which Matthew appears as an American adventurer soldiering in Spain in 1836, and as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade 100 years later. Repeatedly the author writes a scene that the reader is expected to follow in good faith, only to have Matthew, a chronic and helpless liar, admit that nothing of the sort ever happened. Then the incident is retold in terms of richer and yet more baroque untruth.

Matthew likes to call himself "the Walking Zircon," and his customary mental state is one of luxuriation in the wonder of his own phoniness. He is a man of high ability who does nothing. He seeks out degradation and implores the reader to revile him, but secretly he is in love with every rotten atom of himself.

The author finds Matthew's guilt as an Ibiza layabout a trifle more fascinating than the case warrants, and any reader who has put in time loafing in the European sun may suspect that he understands the inspiration for The Spanish Soldier. Buckholz himself lives on Ibiza, and his novel about Matthew's motiveless quest simply reflects an expatriate's guilty belief that he should face reality--which is to say, go back to the U.S. and get mugged in the subway.

Far worse books have been written for better motives, however, and despite the overcomplicated substructure, Buckholz's novel is an intermittent delight. The author is the best free-associating baloney stuffer since Richard Condon got tired. Matthew Mendelsohn's lies are good lies indeed --grossly outrageous and very funny. There is the lie of the Jewish Miss Universe, the lie of Matthew's buddy's on-the-battlefield commission, the truly evil-minded lie of Rosa the Kisser. Each is an authentic zircon, guaranteed to scratch cheese, free of defects for 90 days, less parts and labor. -J.S.

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