Mr. Sincerity

THE HACK by Wilfrid Sheed. 279 pages. Macmillan. $4.95.

Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts is the saga of a cynical writer of a newspaper agony column who is sucked into emotional involvements with his correspondents and almost against his will achieves a kind of faith. Author Wilfrid Sheed's funny, sad, perceptive novel turns the story upside down. It recounts the fate of a magazine writer who starts with a serene, uncluttered faith and, as it slips away from him, tries desperately to become a cynical hack.

Career Pap. Bert Flax is a sunny, shallow, sincere young man who begins his writing career as a precocious student in a Bronx parochial school, submitting smug little essays to the Catholic press--most notably the Tiny Messenger and Catholic Woman. His subjects run to problems like dirty movies and where the angels go in the wintertime; his most masterly creation is Father Danny, "a lean, clear-eyed man, with a spring in his step and a great fund of natural humility." Bert is so good at this kind of pap, in fact, that he decides to make a career of it; soon his essays, his Father Danny stories and occasional poems make the name Flax a byword among Catholic ladies.

What trips Bert up is his decision to live in the suburbs with his wife and five children. In the wealthy town of Bloodbury, Bert is appalled by the comfortable banality of the faith practiced at St. Jude's--a church that strikes him as a mere "antiseptic comfort station." The wheyfaced priests at St. Jude's, "moving knowingly from the book to the cruets," seem to be "a million light years" away from Father Danny. Even Bert's wife fails him; her romantic notion of her husband is that he is "her serene man of faith, her plaster saint"; all she really wants of him is "the serenity without the plaster, but he'd forgotten how to separate them."

Tight Smiles. Hemmed in by five sniffling children who always seem to be "passing the family cold sloppily among them" and a mother-in-law "with a voice like a trench mortar," Bert feels his boredom growing "wantonly, insanely; every week it flung another wet arm around him." As boredom grows, faith recedes, and guilt closes in on Bert like a summer fog. He sits before his typewriter starting sentences he never finishes ("Where pagans go wrong is that . . ."; "Christmas, as Chesterton once put it . . ."). The rejection slips pile up. Whenever Bert tries to explain his trial of faith to family and friends, they go into "hiding somewhere behind tight, patient smiles." Sobbing with vexation, he shouts, "Matty, Dave, I want to have this thing out right now! This whole goddamn thing!" But they are not listening. Finally he suffers a breakdown and flees Bloodbury and family. When the doctor comes to see him, he is leafing through the Reader's Digest, idly looking for clues to his failure.

Author Sheed, 32, son of Roman Catholic Publisher Frank Sheed, tells Bert's story with a sharp eye for the church's eccentricities and a deadly ear for the claptrap cliches of clerical talk. The Hack is not so moving as Miss Lonelyhearts. But in a way Bert Flax suffers a sadder fate than Nathanael West's hero--the destruction of an adequate mind and a good heart through a guileless excess of unexamined belief. Faith, he suggests, cannot be taken on faith, but must be critically examined if it is to support a man's soul.

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