THE LATE GREAT CREATURE.

By Brock Brower '53. New York: AtheneumPublishers, 1972. 300 pp. $6.95.

Brock Brower's new novel is about the fear, bad faith, and moral rot that he finds endemic in America today. What a novel to be reviewed in the stern and granite-ribbed pages of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine! And yet, come to think of it... some of those anti-feminine alumni letters... and the political wisdom in the Class Notes... Men of Dartmouth, Brower's new novel may be just what you need.

Brower's forte is creepy voices. In his first novel we heard an advertising man, a professional soldier, and various Faulkner types (it was a parody of Southern Gothic). Here we are led to (or kept from) Simon Moro, the last of Hollywood's Karloff-type monsters, by a failing professional journalist, Warner Williams, and a sleazy horror-film director, Terry Cowan. Williams has all the latest troubles and talk, but just a shade off: he writes "m.-s." for "s.-m." (i.e., multiple sclerosis for sado-masochism): he thinks “fulsome" is a good thing; and his images are unconsciously ludicrous (Moro, he says, “crawled into town on his shaggy hams"). Cowan is a jazzier, sillier version of Williams. He says "shields" for "shades" (sunglasses), likes to exhibit himself against restaurant windows, and is talk-show witty. (On the dangers New York: "Why do you think Kong climbed the Empire State Building?") With these two compulsive yakkers we go back into Moro's confused past, we watch the filming of his last movie, and we visit New York for the premiere and climax.

By this time the story is two-thirds over and we're leaning forward nervously in our seats. Who is Simon Moro really? Will Brower be able to produce a monster who can fulfill and surpass our expectations? Shakspere laid a similar task on himself in Othello when, after Desdemona's father and his fellow senators had raved about that black mercenary's trick seduction, Othello comes onstage to win them over... and does, by God. Brower attempts a similar feat in the third section, when Simon Himself Is Talking!

It's a tough challenge for a writer. But Brower is a hardened campaigner. He has written as editor of The Daily D, as a student at Harvard Law School, as a Rhodes Scholar, and as a soldier. He wrote for the Saturday Evening' Post (now dead) and Creative Playthings (defunct); he wrote a novel (Debris); he writes for Esquire (shrunken) and Life. All this professional experience has left its mark: Brower's monster, when we finally confront him, is dreadful. Absolutely dreadful.

A free-lance critic of modern fiction and apoet, Professor O'Hara teaches English atthe University of Connecticut.