CALL THE KEEPER

Nat Hentoff certainly knows the scene and he has been writing about it successfully for some years now as knowledgeable author, jazz critic, essayist and, last year, creator of the acclaimed juvenile Jazz Country (Harper & Row 1965 p. 252(J-90)). This, his first novel, is presented in a montage of splices which could serve beautifully as a movie script as might the publisher's introduction: "Today. Manhattan. Below Fourteenth Street. Negro. White. The scene. The volcano." We look at a variety of viewpoints touched off loosely by the death of Sanders, a plainclothes cop who'd "turned white." Evidently because he is depicted as a sadist. Or in the words of Billy, hipster, Negro, engineer at a jazz station— "It was the cat was all evil— all over evil...a big black lizard you could never get away from." Then there's Billy's sister Diane, a Smith graduate who doesn't really have much to say because she's busy making it in the best of both worlds. And there's Randal, the only white musician in a jazz combo who can play it black and is just trying to get by; he's relaxed except for a certain WASP point of view. But Septimus "the black Dostoevski" first, psychopath second, has his verbal and physical bouts with Horowitz, an unbelievable character, a plainclothesman second, intellectual first, who manages to be so full of integrity he sounds phoney. Finally there's John the Avenger who gives up love in the form of his homey Jewish wife to live in the world of the Black Nationalist, and Thomas, the artistic, presumed liberal. Enough characters for a short book? A long movie perhaps. This novel only touches the surface and the scene down there below fourteenth street is yet to be explained. Hentoff has tried to do too much. Cool it baby.