The Idols of the Cave

WITH a literary title, silent-screen dialogue, and narrative development which relies almost entirely on multiple encounter, Mr. Prokosch’s new novel will strike many who are unfamiliar, or even familiar, with his early work as being an old-fashioned, highly suspect version of sophisticated New Yorkers living in and on the fringes of World War II. As a slick, japanned bid for the popular fiction lists. The Idols of the Cave must be judged solely on its ability to create interest within the touchy, narrow contimes its author has imposed upon it.

These limitations, glaring when they come from the pen of so splendid a writer, seem even more exasperating when they extend with flat, stubborn technique as far south as the Yale Club and as far north, northeast, as a West Coast editorial law will allow. To be a character in The Idols of the Care means a shuttle life between hotels, restaurants, a private home. Sherry’s bar in the Metropolitan. and the Central Park Zoo. In all these habitats, a Prokosch hero is liable to swift, unhappy encounter with a Prokosch heroine. It may start off innocently enough, but it passes rapidly into a scene with refugees, six silver pheasants strolling through roses, and a Bavarian Cream which sounds unbelievably sinister when the author serves it up in French.

Aspects of the novel have been seen and felt — a caged lioness in the middle of the city; a discarded woman facing north on Park Avenue. What the book lacks in selectivity, point of view, and drive has been amply made up for in shorthand transcriptions of a bridge game, interior decoration, and the imagery of Turtle Bay.

The Idols of the Cure remains a glittering display of skyscrapers reflected in the waters of a scenically fortuitous Central Park, a moody refusal to weed out an expert, overwritten story line which is at once plausibly exciting and patently uneventful.

T. E. DOREMUS