Dwarfs

The playwright's first and only novel - written in the early 1950's, partially converted into a short play (of the same name) in 1960, revised in 1989, but never before published. The story here - what little there is of it - involves the moods and quirks of four fairly bright, fairly depressed ordinary young Londoners, and the triangular tensions among them (vaguely foreshadowing Betrayal). Mark, a sometime actor and sometime writer (not unlike HP), apparently Jewish, a feckless womanizer, is devoted to handsome pal Pete - a charismatic but whiny and narcissistic intellectual. Also fascinated by Pete is hapless Len Weinstein, a train-station laborer and poet who's intense about mathematics and his own existential misery ("I'm the ragamuffin who vomits in the palace. There's a dryrot in me. Rot everywhere"). And in addition to this odd trio - which Pete sees as a "church"-like unit - there's Pete's girlfriend, schoolteacher Virginia, who's becoming exasperated with Pete's moodiness (not to mention his lack of sexual energy). Finally, then, and somewhat predictably, Mark sleeps with Virginia - which triggers a long exchange of petulant tirades between Mark and Pete, who trade accusations and pontificate, adolescently, on friendship, morality, etc. Most of the novel consists of faintly Pinteresque dialogue: occasionally cryptic, occasionally sharp and funny, thickened with chat about Beethoven, Shakespeare, theology, suicide, the masses, and the establishment. Interspersed now and again are more abstract monologues, which often read like parodies of Beckett ("Air now. Now tread back. Can move. Shall move"). So there's lots to pore over here for Pinter critics and other academics - but most readers will find this an affectless exercise, too mannered and too dated (in its angry-young-man poses) to generate more than passing interest. (Kirkus Reviews)