Somnambule in Spain

VANGEL GRIFFIN (371 pp.)--Herbert Lobsenz--Harper ($4.50).

When a novel begins, "Vangel Griffin was a mass-produced member of the middle middleclass. The first 28 years of his life were stamped, cut out and patterned like a piece of processed cheese," three people deserve instant commiseration. The first is the author, who is obviously about to grate a very stale piece of thematic cheese. The second is the reader, who is only too familiar with the fictional conformists in flim-flannel suiting. The third is the hero himself, for whom the author has such clear contempt that all he can look forward to is two or three hundred pages of abusive redemption.

And so poor Vangel Griffin goes forth to have his values laundered. He leaves his wife (a bitch, in his words), his job in a law firm (a bore), and his country (a Babbitt hutch), and goes to Spain. Vangel has some sense of purpose: he intends to commit suicide in exactly one year. A woman takes his mind off his goal.

Satry is a somnambule. one of those fantasy girls who sleepwalk into the hero's bed on an acquaintance of about half an hour. As he watches her puttering blissfully about the kitchen, and serving wine with meals, and unobtrusively bolstering his male ego by asking him what time it is, Vangel comes to realize that Europeans Know How To Live. When he is later so masculine as to give Satry two or three solid slaps in the face, he suddenly realizes that he has something to live for.

There are pages and characters in Herbert Lobsenz' first novel (which won the $10,000 Harper Prize for 1961) that are not total losses. In Satry's brother Alonso. Author Lobsenz fashions a Don Quixote-cum-Candide whose pratfalls over the purity of his own logic attain a kind of tragic hilarity. Alonso is the puppet of his fate and a prototype of all the fanatically idealistic students who march and die in the streets.

Having lived in Spain in the mid-'50s. Author Lobsenz, 28, knows something of the parched, granitic harshness of the Spanish earth and the grave pride and passion of the Spaniard, and he conveys these with authority. Unfortunately, he lacks all control over his plot, and he makes most of his points by bending a reader's ear till it aches. After a flurry of melodrama, Vangel ends up with a whole new set of values. Here they are: "I would like to repeal suffrage for women. I would like to end all war. I would like to pull down all prejudices and ignorance and persuade men to live a rational life."

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