NEWS

As far as general readability is concerned Mr. Delbanco's tangled fabrications have been downhill racing all the way since his first successful The Martlet's Tale (1966) and this one's another irritating mix of strangulated vision and alluvial prose. Four white American revolutionists, essentially loners but oddly suspended in a mutuality of "underground" stance, confront the exclusion and demands of black separatism. One commits suicide after composing a mad manifesto about black inferiority; one is murdered; one is under a sentence of death; and another grieves for "the four of us (who) inherit the merely meek earth. . . . We are. . . the victors gone to spoil." Delbanco is at his best stabbing into the heart of anger, humiliation and tear when the broad channel of alienated exodus and atavistic activism is abruptly diverted. ("When I ask myself about the kinds of terror I find them here. . . . And the worst is that I'm certain we could cut the black mass down, that I'd shoot if threatened, by skin color only, at sight." But despite the flashback backgrounds of the men and their women, the quartet of paleface cop-outs are still the four faces of a condition, marked by the odor of roast Pig, rather than individual consciousness. And a sentence may go on for two and a half pages something along this order: ". . . the world quite precisely divided, and recognition instant, and communities perforce in the shelter, street, and alliance easy. . . .