Absent presences; in a new novel, an Englishman returns to a childhood summer.('Spies')

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 01-APR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Bernard Shaw couldn't do it, Henry James couldn't do it, but the ingenious English author Michael Frayn does do it: write novels and plays with equal success. His most recent play, "Copenhagen," about a problematical meeting in 1941 between the physicist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish mentor Niels Bohr, won three Tony Awards and ran on Broadway for more than nine months; his 1999 novel, "Headlong," concerning the possible discovery of a lost painting by Bruegel, was listed among the Booker Prize finalists and the Times Book Review's Editors' Choices. Frayn began light, writing topical and humorous columns for the Guardian, but has extended his reach and seriousness while keeping a sprightly intellectuality. A brilliant novella of 1989, "The Trick of It" (first published in this magazine), was comic in the obtuse maneuvering of its hero, a literal-minded young academic mismarried to a middle-aged novelist of the eccentric, Spark/Murdoch/Rose Macaulay mold, but profound in its grasp of the opposition between the creative spirit and the critical.

Frayn's new novel, "Spies" (Holt; $23), drapes a valedictory sadness upon a mystery-story armature. Two boys -- our unkempt, ductile hero, Stephen Wheatley, and his impeccable, domineering friend Keith Hayward -- set about investigating, in their little neighborhood of fourteen properties, Keith's abrupt declaration that his mother is a German spy. The boys live on a rather newly built dead-end street called the Close, between a small shopping...

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