THE DIARY OF A RAPIST.

By Evan S.Connell Jr. '45. New York: Simon andSchuster, 1966. 252 pp. $4.95.

You're reading the morning newspaper and a photograph of a young man who has just been convicted of murder and rape leaps out at you. He's a young married man in his early twenties. You wonder what led him to this crime of passion and brutal violence. You note the weak chin, the sallow face, the deep-set eyes, and the look of terrified bewilderment.

If you're Truman Capote you spend four years investigating a murder, talking to everyone connected with it, and getting inside the very souls and minds of the condemned killers to come up with the best-seller InCold Blood.

If you're Evan S. Connell Jr. '45, you let your mind do the work. You put flesh and blood on that man in the newspaper, endow him with an older wife who neither loves him or wants him, employ him at a boring office job - and create a terrified man who in his "sickness" turns to terrorize the society he cannot control. This man becomes the "author" of The Diary of A Rapist.

Day by day you reveal him, with each diary entry probing his innermost thoughts and actions. You watch the world and events for an entire year through your eyes and through his, seeking to penetrate and highlight those things which have the greatest relevance to this troubled young man: A violent accident on the street corner, a newspaper account of young hoodlums beating and raping a girl, a rain lashed evening, a depressing day in the office. These are elements now .shared by you (the author) and the imagined diarist.

You create your story, the character, and the diary with each entry, carefully building to the inevitable moment of extreme violence which must come. It is the only way you believe, that such a man can burst the bonds of a frustrating marriage, job, life and the sickness within himself. With bid fascination you watch him take the in. evitable step, then recoil from its aftermath then the long brooding periods until the nal decision to reveal it with the sure knowledge that death, in its ultimate way, is the only means of escape from life. The final entries in Diary of A Rapist are blank - for the story has ended and tomorrow and tomorrow another face will appear in the morning papers.

It is all so plausible that one can only agree with the concluding one line sentence - "December 25 - In the sight of the Lord I must be one of many." Fascinating reading this, but not quite up to some of Connell's earlier works.