Critic's Novel

MR. BELUNCLE (310 pp.)--V. S. Pritchett--Harcourt, Brace ($3.50).

Victor Sawdon Pritchett lives in a cottage in the English countryside and, week in and out, writes (for the New Statesman and Nation) the best literary criticism in Britain today. But Critic Pritchett has an itch, and a talent, to do more. When he has time, which is not too often, he writes fiction. At its best, as in his book of stories, It May Never Happen (1947), this fiction shows marvelous quiet skill at catching the character of well-meaning failures.

Author Pritchett's new novel, Mr. Beluncle, is in his best short-story grain. He has a mischievous eye for suburban pomposity, he invents delightfully loony characters, he writes with crisp wit. The opening 50 pages weave a fine picture of "mind-sharpening, heart-deadening warfare" between a middle-aged husband and wife. But then something goes wrong.

Mr. Beluncle is in the furniture line, and business is bad, but Mr. Beluncle has castles in the sky. He is sternly self-assured with his wife, his three sons and the widow who puts up the money for the furniture business. Part of his assurance comes from belonging to the Parkinson group, a circle of self-elect who believe in Love, Smiling, and the Unreality of Death. "When I go to my factory and make furniture, to mortal sense I seem to be making wardrobes, armchairs and so on, but really I am spreading love," says Mr. Beluncle. "And the more I spread love, the more orders I get . . ." Nonetheless, the firm slides toward bankruptcy.

Now the stage is set, the characters in motion--but nothing much happens. Author Pritchett fails to cap his story with any recognizable climax, and it slowly sputters out. In final impression, it is more an album of sketches than an integrated novel.

Pritchett started Mr. Beluncle more than ten years ago, set it aside for lack of wartime leisure, finished it only last year. Now that it is out of the way, he has a new book of criticism and another novel coming up. He hopes the novel can be done much faster than Mr. Beluncle, for "it's bad for a book to lie around so long." Critic Pritchett is right, as usual.

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