Surprisingly Sensitive Soul

THE NICE AMERICAN (310 pp.]--Gerald Sykes--Creative Age ($3).

Twenty-five years ago, a good many U.S. intellectuals were buying one-way tickets to Paris to escape their countrymen's "cultural Philistinism." After a while, with thinning hair and dampened enthusiasm, they began to drift home. One U.S. highbrow who refused to join the trek to Paris was Gerald Sykes. Stay home and work for what you want, he told his fellow intellectuals; in his tidy novel, The Nice American, he is still offering pretty much the same advice.

Novelist Sykes's hero is Lieut. Colonel Harlan Childress, engineer by trade and artist by instinct, who finds himself commanding an Army post in Algiers at the end of World War II. Like many an

American before him, he has fallen in love with the Old World. To his French and Arab friends, who look upon Americans as Roman-style imperialists come to organize and barbarize their cultivated Greek-style world, Childress is "the nice American," a surprisingly sensitive soul.

Childress' problem is whether to stay where he is and marry his French mistress, or go home and patch things up with his former wife, Mollie. On the scene descends Mollie herself, breathing high-powered charm and making a distressing show of her lack of sensitivity and moral cultivation. When Childress quarrels with a crusty old U.S. Senator for international rabble-rousing, she mocks him as naive. When he talks about settling down to a career as an art photographer, she urges him to devote himself instead to "getting ahead." Mollie lives by what Novelist Sykes bitingly calls "the Manhattan code." She fancies herself a political "progressive," but she really just has a power bug. And by keeping eternally busy at uplift, she provides herself with "an almost watertight bulkhead against melancholy."

Childress is rocked back on his heels by Mollie, but something deep inside drives him to the grim decision to remarry her and go back home. A European friend explains the deep-inside part for him. "The American woman is a barbarian by comparison . . . She's a Roman next to a Greek. Forgive me, but you're a Roman too, with a Greek sensibility, and that's why you must tame your Roman woman before you'll be happy."

The Sykes point is on the preachy side --and his allegorical Mollie is a bit of a slur on America, not to mention American womanhood. But then, Sykes is really talking to intellectuals who have long found Mollie vulgar anyhow, and who, without the caricature, might reject the sermon out of hand.

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