Word: spiv
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...modern Vanbrugh who tells the story, he is a nobody, but he has a spiv's eye for survival, the derisive eloquence of a shameless man and the bogus kind of face that, as he suggests, would go well on a butler or a bishop. As Author Linklater tells it in his savagely comic novel, Vanbrugh spent a profitable war as a wingless wing commander in the R.A.F. and ends his career as a superior flunky in the household of a Texas aristocrat. Says he: "I see my destiny, I recognize my genius ... but England, I have not abandoned...
...hero: Lord Claverton, an aged, retired Cabinet minister who idly fingers the empty pages of his once-crowded engagement book. Two unwelcome visitors from the past destroy the sand castle of his memories-precarious memories of what was essentially bogus success. Visitor No. 1 is a moneyed spiv from Central America who shared in a disreputable episode of Claverton's youth. Visitor No. 2 is Maisie Mont joy (now respectably renamed Mrs. Carghill), a onetime chorus girl whom the young Claverton seduced; in true Victorian melodramatic fashion, Claverton's father had squelched her breach-of-promise suit with...
Cheat. Dangerfield, like his creator Donleavy, gets to Dublin's Trinity College as a student on the G.I. Bill of Rights. Unlike Brooklyn-born Writer Donleavy, a Navy vet who studied natural science at Trinity, Dangerfield is a spiv student of law who cheats at his exams, cheats on his wife Marion (whom he calls "a scheming slut"), cheats a succession of easy conquests, from barmaids to old maids. When one of them laments "It's adultery," Dangerfield comforts her: "One mortal sin is the same as another." He is the pest of the Coombe, Dublin...
...ROCK, by Francis King (248 pp.; Pantheon; $3.50), is based on the fact that the human comedy is seldom humane. British Novelist Francis King, 34, pitches his inhumane comedy on the rise and fall of a young Greek spiv of the postwar dead-beat generation. The book's larger theme is the old motif of American innocence v. European corruption. Reflected in the golden eye of a Mediterranean setting, what is sordid and depraved becomes corrosively hilarious. Spiro Polymerides is a sun-baked peasant Apollo. He is taken up by an arty, effeminate, high-minded official...
...FLYING BOX, by Mary McMinnies. An astonishingly good first novel about fumbling Britons who still pretend that they are carrying the white man's burden in Malaya. The decline and fall of Empire is measured by the spurious successes of a black-marketeering London spiv who finds loot among the ruins...