Dead Endings

...Biswas, An Area of Darkness and In a Free State—he has concerned himself most deeply with the poignant and unsettled psychology of the outsider, the person who simultaneously belongs everywhere and nowhere...

...Tyutychev's obsession has bound him more closely to humanity and to God, for when he heard a new melody, he "was elevated like the Host blessed by the Holy Spirit, exuberant...

...His new novel, Guerrillas (Knopf, 248 pp., $7.95), is set on an unnamed Caribbean island, previously a colonial outpost of England and now in economic thrall to the American businessmen who have battened on its one profitable natural resource, bauxite...

...This ancient tropical paradise has become a festering dungheap of junked cars, rubbish dumps, shantytowns with "crooked walls, broken pavements, unswept gutters...

...In violent fulfillment of the dark prophecies that haunt Naipaul's pages, Jimmy murders "the white rat" Jane as she leaves his bed to flee back to England...

...He is not precisely a foreigner, yet in his finest books—A House for Mr...

...During the day Isakovsky edits a journal devoted to folk music...

...In his youth he had decided that "the only way to endure as a man in this country of his was to become wholly useless...

...You made the empty page pure form...

...Inspired by the man's joyous triumph over adversity, Isakovsky chooses redemption through suffering in place of constipated anonymity...

...The book's central figure is Peter Roche, once a martyr of the South African resistance and ephemeral celebrity in London...

...Put in charge of an agricultural commune financed by Roche's employers, Jimmy has let the noble-minded project deteriorate into a jungle of weeds while he writes a simple-minded novel about a high-born English beauty (with the shlock-Gothic name Clarissa) who is ravaged by a super-hero of the people...

...In the end Guerrillas simply does not hold together...

...No single mood or experience—with the glorious exception of Tyutychev—is fully developed, and the result is a very clever novel that just misses being profound...

...Yet Isakovsky's new-found nobility and melancholy fate are not as moving as they should be...

...But the KGB verse is unendurably crude, and, mirabile dictu, Isakovsky rewrites it...

...Jane herself exudes the smug confidence of the ill-informed and self-congratulatory liberal, blind to the contradiction "between what she said and what she was so secure of being...

...Cohen's anxiety-ridden, middle-aged Jewish poet in present-day Russia, Yuri Maximovich Isakovsky, has also let his gifts stagnate, as frustrated by Bolshevik totalitarianism as Pechorin was thwarted by the harsh autocracy of Nicholas I. Isakovsky is no match, however, for Lermontov's headstrong philanderer: He knows that to be both a Jew and a poet in modem Russia is to invite a double glance from the evil eye, and he has concentrated every effort on becoming as anonymous as possible without actually being dead...

...Cohen insists on playing all the possibilities, but he is not that much of a virtuoso...

...at night he writes and discards the vagrant images that cannot survive his self-defeat...

...At times he even feels envious of his one-time friend Kolokolov, Cohen's hilarious caricature of Yevtushenko as international celebrity, Kremlin boot-licker and rotten poet...

...As "a man who didn't have a place to go back to," he has settled for an anomalous job with a large island firm that was originally in the slave trade and is trying to live down its venal beginnings by financing good works among the poor...

...Unhappily for Isakovsky's cautiously guarded anonymity, and the forbidden treasures he has hidden?the lovingly preserved volumes of Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova and Pasternak, Bulgakov and Blok—he is suddenly fingered by "the powers" to accompany Kolokolov on a week's visit to New York, and ordered to include in a public reading of his own work a poem coded for a Soviet agent...

...Although Naipaul can render the island landscape of the dispossessed with impressive power—the shabby mixture of putrescence and fertility, violence and torpor—he fails to convey any clearly defined point of view about his characters, settling instead for a lazy, inconsistent vagueness that deprives them of particularity and coherence...

...What are we supposed to make of his resistance to apartheid when he declares, without irony, that "I have always accepted authority...

...But now that ironic dedication to uselessness is literal—he is safe, unnoticed, and poetically sterile...

...Yet Naipaul wishes to have it both ways, with Jimmy as the wretchedly incompetent black "leader" whose head is stuffed with paperback straw, and as a sinister figure of evil, ambiguously menacing, sardonically adept at the throw-away apercu: "Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla...

...What awakened Isakovsky from his lobotomized sleep of safety to his unprecedented act of defiance was an encounter with a remarkable free spirit, Yasha Isaievich Tyutychev, a vagabond who devotes his life to collecting and preserving folk songs...

...Depressed and passive, Roche complains: "I've built my whole life on sand...

...When a young black gang leader, a former member of Jimmy's commune, is shot by the police, the slum-infested city becomes briefly engulfed in riot and fire before the American bauxite company sends in a fleet of helicopters to control the mob and protect its investments...

...The poem is the first he has been able to complete in years...

...Through his job and her predatory sexual adventuring, Roche and Jane become destructively entangled with the enigmatic Jimmy Ahmed, a half-black, half-Chinese native of the island who was the Third World darling of radical-chic London until he was deported for rape...

...Beyond Jimmy's sadistic fantasies, the island is seething with premonitory signs of civil violence and guerrilla war...

...Up to that irreversible act of destruction Jimmy had been ludicrous and rather sad, hardly a menace to anyone but himself...

...An incautious amateur of social justice who mistakes her aggressively opinionated irritability for disinterested idealism, she is an arrogant grab-bag of "all the scattered, unrelated ideas deposited in her soul as she had adventured through life, the debris of a dozen systems picked up from a dozen men...

...His one small book of verse was published 15 years ago, and he has finished nothing since, his gift now an ash heap of burnt-out metaphors...

...For the devitalized drifters who are the principals of Guerrillas, it is "a place at the end of the world a place that had exhausted its possibilities...

...After the spirited and very funny early scenes, Cohen becomes increasingly ambivalent about the tone and method of the novel: Is it a satiric indictment of Soviet oppression, a contemptuous swipe at the Yevtushenko groupies in New York, an elegiac tribute to the masters of modern Russian poetry who were hounded into oblivion, a lament for the Jews of Russia...

...Roche is similarly disjointed and confusingly out of focus...

...Arthur A. Cohen's A Hero in His Time (Random House, 278 pp., $8.95) starts out in fine comic fettle, resplendent with a title ironically echoing Lermontov's passionate and intelligent officer Pechorin, who wasted his talents in destructive bravado...

...Roche administrates this guilty philanthropy, but feels his efforts are little more than a charade and a disheartening waste of time...

...I saved 302 songs from being forgotten and every one of those songs will testify for me when I come to the judgment...

...He could not conceive for a moment how the powers arrayed about him could get to the soul of a poet...

...His English mistress, Jane, who followed him to the West Indies on a reckless impulse, has found after several months that her romantic enchantment with him as a heroic revolutionary has crumbled before the depressing truth that Roche is at heart "half colonial," drained of political energy, far more a man to whom things happen than a doer...

...Imprisoned for 14 years on a charge of parasitism because he would not take a steady job, Tyutychev not only survived but found happiness by learning and memorizing "a whole new literature of song" from the Tartars, Uzbeks, Turkestani, and Mongols among his fellow-prisoners...

...Fully aware of the inevitable punishment, he recites the rewritten poem and returns to Russia...

...Naipaul, born to an Indian family in Trinidad and educated in England, has drawn the central theme of his novels—displacement and exile?from his own deracinated heritage and upbringing...

...Adept at self-mockery, he scolds his silence: "While others were touching the acme, you became a nadaist, a nyetomane, a nadirist—in a word, a nonentity...

...We are provided with no links of reason or experience to explain his metamorphosis from courageous martyr to passive refugee...

...Apparently the story is based on an actual murder, yet Naipaul's tidy finale seems arbitrary rather than inevitable...