Mixed Fiction

THIRTY YEARS, by John Marquand (466 pp.; Little, Brown; $5). The plot line of this three-decade collection of short stories (plus a few nonfiction pieces of reminiscence) is familiar: boy meets code, boy breaks code, code breaks boy. The codes are Boston and family, club and army. After a bout of spiritual beachcombing, the slightly disenchanted heroes generally return to pukka grace. Boston is the city Marquand almost hates to love, but love it he must--though he is not above shaking his own family tree for laughs. Most of the fiction was written for big-circulation magazines, and even the better tales are apt to swerve from the winding lanes of art to the happy-ending highways of commerce. The best of the lot, Merry Christmas, All, starts as a rasping Yuletide battle of the sexes and ends as a mere tempest in a toddy. Marquand tells just about all that one needs to know about Hawaii and its Regular Army post (Lunch at Honolulu, The End Game) or Harvard (Commencement, June 11, 1953) or Mongolia (Where Are You, Prince?). In these and other pieces the ceiling of insight is sometimes low, but the satirical visibility is high, and there is always the steady hand on the entertainment controls.

MUSEUM PIECES, by William Plomer (282 pp.; Noonday; $3.50), is an expertly-fashioned literary paradox: a sad comedy that turns into an amusing tragedy. It is about a couple of leftovers from Edwardian England--Toby d'Arfey, a brilliant, sardonic dilettante who was born in 1900 and develops into a stepchild of the century, and his twice-widowed mother, Mrs. Mountfaucon, a sweet and summery ineffectual thing who is abused by her son and adores it. Toby's career is marked by his successive failures as a speculator, opera singer, painter, milliner and playwright. During World War II, when he is laid low by a deadly disease and the family fortunes have been dissipated, Toby learns he cannot even afford to die in modish style. British Novelist Plomer is an extremely skillful and witty writer (the eyes of a spaniel "had a look at once deeply resentful and falsely soulful, like the eyes of somebody pretending to listen to a Beethoven quartet but thinking about an assessment for income tax").

THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI, by Pierre Boulle (224 pp.; Vanguard; $3), is a superb, ironical study of a minor British Don Quixote who insists on fighting for code and country--even though it is yesterday's code of yesterday's officers and gentlemen. When Colonel Nicholson is captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore, he tries to hand over his pistol with an air of "quiet dignity," having earnestly practiced the gesture. But he is allowed no dignity at all: the Japanese order him to build a railroad bridge. Huffing and puffing about the Hague convention, he whips his Tommies into that task with all his narrow heart and soul, in order to set an example to "these savages." He never realizes that he is really helping the enemy. In his suspenseful, violent plot, French Novelist Boulle suggests that this particular war is fought not between East and West but between common sense and Blimpery. In the end, Blimp wins, but at a high price: he dies, crushed by a white man's burden that was too heavy for him.

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