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SLOUCHING TOWARDS KALAMAZOO, by Peter De Vries (Little, Brown). Like earlier De Vries novels, his new one features a ramshackle plot and terrible jokes (a sympathetic husband on his wife’s view that while children may hold a marriage together, they ruin a woman’s figure: “ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘there is a destiny that ends our shapes’ ”). But we read De Vries precisely because he is a man demonically possessed by puns, by twists of phrase that torment him until he can find a place to work them in, and by the imminent collapse of the English language. His narrator this time is a wiseacre North Dakota underachiever who can’t get out of the eighth grade because he spends his time reading Joyce instead of memorizing the main products of Venezuela. Anthony Thrasher goes for coaching sessions to his teacher, Maggie Doubloon, whose assigning The Scarlet Letter has already excited the town book burners. Miss Doubloon’s pregnancy by Anthony inflames the local moralists further, but she moves to Kalamazoo and makes a fortune marketing T-shirts emblazoned with a scarlet A +.

At the age of two, Miss Doubloon’s illegitimate son by Anthony is observed “glancing over his shoulder as he toddled about the floor in search of electric sockets with which to excite alarm.” De Vries has ever been a moralist and theologian as well as a jokester, and the centerpiece of this novel is a public debate in which Anthony’s minister father and a militant atheist convert each other and exchange positions. Anthony himself becomes a founder of a new religion, the First Church of Christian Atheists, while his father turns his ministerial tones to a lucrative new career in TV voice-overs: “He supplied a kind of Joycean interior monologue for a dapper poodle named Alphonse, who was snobbishly disdainful of the leading brands except Kennel King, mouthing scorn for all dry and canned substitutes, instantly detectable as such and dismissed with the most withering mots, perking up only when the real thing was put under his nose. My father’s golden diction had become famous, and he quite rich.” This isn’t De Vries’s best novel. It never is; we keep on saying that. Yet who else has been so consistently funny?

WALTER CLEMONS

APASSION FOR FILMS: HENRI LANGLOIS AND THE CINEMATHEQUE FRANQAISE, by Richard Roud (Viking). One of his adversaries called him “a ragpicker of genius.” When the talkies came in and it became apparent that no one had any fervent interest in preserving “outmoded” silent films, Henri Langlois conceived the notion of a cinematheque, or film library, which would collect the best examples of an art still not taken quite seriously. There is some uninteresting controversy about precedence: a Swedish film library seems to have come first. But Langlois was an enthusiast and showman as well as an archivist: his great innovation was to open a library in which films were shown night and day, in juxtapositions often mysterious to all but Langlois. He was a one-man band, an extreme eccentric, who programmed the early French films of Georges Melies along with the American work of Howard Hawks, whom he early pronounced a great director to the puzzlement of Hawks’s countrymen. Langlois was a magpie collector and a notoriously bad organizer of his finds. He chastised his friend Iris Barry: when offered all of Buster Keaton’s films for the Museum of Modern Art, she had cautiously said she would save only “the best.” Langlois’s appetite was not only for “the best” but for everything. His rediscoveries became legendary: Abel Gance’s Napoleon, the placement of a huge photograph of the forgotten Louise Brooks outside a famous 1955 exhibition. “Garbo doesn’t exist. Dietrich doesn’t exist. There is only Louise Brooks,” he said to carpers.

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Richard Roud, who knew Langlois in the eighteen years before his death in 1977, has written the best kind of biography of an odd, impassioned man. Roud is ardently partisan, witheringly contemptuous of attempts by Willard Van Dyke of the Museum of Modern Art to block Langlois’s effort to open a New York cinematheque-, one film archive in New York—MOMA’s—was enough, Van Dyke felt, and he had sufficient political influence to stifle a competitor. Roud is even more moving on the Paris uproar of 1968, when President de Gaulle is supposed to have asked his staff, “Who is this Henri Langlois?” and Andre Malraux, the Minister of Culture, tried to replace Langlois with a more efficient bureaucrat. Langlois’s screenings had fostered a whole generation of young French filmmakers—Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer and Chabrol among them. They now rose up and marched, along with enraged film students. Protests from Orson Welles (OF COURSE WILL NOT PERMITSCREENING OF MY FILMS AT CINEMATHEQUE FRANQAISE UNTIL FURTHERNOTICE), Charles Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret brought Malraux and De Gaulle to their knees. Roud may be overenthusiastic in suggesting that this outpouring of protest led the way to the Paris student riots later that year. If so, it is a generoushearted error.

A book on what sounds like a special subject turns out to be a terrific adventure story. A paragraph on how Langlois obtained a complete print of Visconti’s Senso, handed through a train window in ten cans at a whistlestop on the Simplon-Orient Express, is typical. My surprised reaction is one that might give the ghost of M. Langlois pleasure: there is a film script in this book waiting to be let out. If the right director and screenwriter can be found, A Passion for Films could become one of the great movies-about-movies, of which there have been few. W.C.

CONVERSATIONS WITH THE ENEMY, by Winston Groom and Duncan Spencer (Putnam). A spooky mix of “Rip Van Winkle” and The Man Without a Country, Robert Garwood’s story is surely one of the saddest tales from the Vietnam War—and one of the most perplexing. It was not until 1979, six years after the war’s end, that POW Bobby Garwood, chattering in Vietnamese and wearing his first shoes in thirteen years, came marching home again. There were no hurrahs. Our other POWs had been welcomed back in 1973. As beneficiaries of Washington’s Operation Homecoming, an umbrella of official forgiveness, they were allowed to forget that few of them had resisted collaboration with the enemy. For most, like superpatriot Jeremiah Denton, later the junior senator from Alabama, collaboration had been essentially passive—a matter of signed “confessions” and fairly innocuous statements of support for the enemy; others, however, were guilty of much more active aiding and abetting. Despite this, there were no prosecutions for misconduct. But that was 1973.

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Things were different in 1979, and the change in the nation’s mood, coupled with Garwood’s long and unexplained absence, raised different questions. Conversations with the Enemy is the story of that absence and of the court-martial that awaited Garwood at the end of it. It is the story of his troubled youth in Adams, Indiana; his capture near Da Nang in 1965; his fourteen years of captivity and collaboration; his eventual release with a dishonorable discharge; and, as an added indignity, his civilian trial on a trumped-up morals charge. Through it all Garwood seems the same hapless and touching punk he had been when he was plucked from a youth detention center by a Marine recruiter back in Indiana. Whether his captivity transformed him, as the prosecution alleged, into the famed “white gook” of G.I. folklore and lurid Vietnam novels such as No Bugles, No Drums is highly doubtful. It is clear, however, that Garwood’s collaboration was different in degree as well as in kind from the passive sort. That he became a scapegoat for the Marine Corps, which was just then beginning its search for a plausible stabin-the-back theory to explain the Vietnam fiasco, is also beyond doubt. But even with these modest certainties and the good work of authors Groom and Spencer, there is still a lot about Garwood’s sojourn in Vietnam that remains mysterious. As the judge remarked at the end of the military trial, we still haven’t heard the whole Bobby Garwood story.

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ELIZABETH POCHODA

THE TIMES ARE NEVER SO BAD, by Andre Dubus (Godine). The Pretty Girl, the novella that opens this fourth collection by Andre Dubus, is one of the strongest and strangest recent works of American short fiction. In it, Dubus engages our understanding complicity—even a reluctant, disturbing degree of sympathy—with a weight-lifting brute, crazed and sick with some kind of love, who rapes his estranged wife. The wife, who legally supplies herself with a gun to defend herself against him, is an uneasy Catholic: “She did believe that in some way her life was not a good one, but in a way the Church had not defined ... .She did not and could not know what about herself she disliked and regretted.” A meticulous study of ordinariness and trashiness in a New England town, of a marriage that is “a cage with rattlesnakes on the floor,” ends with a howl of grief for what the last of the tale’s several speakers views as simply a case of true love gone wrong.

This extraordinary novella is matched by the book’s final piece, “A Father’s Story,” in which a parent’s religious belief comes in crushing conflict with his love for a daughter guilty of an accidental hitand-run fatality. The best of several good stories between these two, “Bless Me, Father,” is a confessional confrontation between a coed and her adulterous father, where both make blackmailing emotional arrangements. As a writer of fiction, Dubus tends to glumness; he will never attract readers by high spirits or sparkling prose. But with each book he cuts deeper into his chosen subjects of ignorant violence and clumsy love. His power is ominous and genuine. W.C.