H Is for Horse

FLEE THE ANGRY STRANGERS (480 pp.) --George Mandel -- Bobbs-Merrill ($3.75).

To earn his literary bread & butter many a novelist from Defoe to Dostoevsky has turned to the news for a fiction plot. The best of them make enduring fiction out of passing fact by drawing deep on their imagination. In Flee the Angry Strangers, Novelist George Mandel has picked a headline subject--drug addiction among teen-agers--but has given it little more than a gaping doubletake.

His heroine, Diane Lattimer, 18, has just broken out of a reformatory. She prides herself on being a hip* chick who can deep-breathe on a stick of Tea (marijuana) or leave it alone. For junkies (addicts) who get hooked on Horse (heroin), she has the smug contempt a moderate drinker might feel for an alcoholic. Emotionally, Diane is a D.P. Home, for her, is not her Bible-thumping mother's flat, but a kind of Greenwich Village inferno. The neurotics who crawl across her life and the pages of Novelist Mandel's book have addresses on Bleecker and MacDougal Streets but no roofs over their weary souls. Plagued with guilt-edged insecurities, they have one fear, themselves; one foe, reality; one condition, despair; one refuge, dope. Charged on Tea and Horse, they are world-beaters.

There is Dincher the trumpeter, who thinks he can trade hot licks with Louis Armstrong; Timmy the homosexual dancer; Louella, a kittenish advance-guard poetess who wants to hang out with real cats; an impotent sadist who pushes (sells) junk to schoolchildren, and a sordid slew of others. Diane has a ball (doped-up good time) with all of them, but can't escape her own ritualistic premise: "There's nothing. There's nowhere, everything is empty." She ricochets from man to man in love affairs as monotonous as the click of billiard balls.

The first time she snorts powdered heroin she vomits. Soon enough she is warming capsules of Horse in a spoon over a burner, mainlining the drug directly into a vein. Each dose sends her into a nerveless Nirvana: "Nothing itself in a uniform of gold, and Nothing loomed bigger than Anything ever could hope to be." To get the nothing her dreams are made of, Diane takes to shoplifting, finally sinks to old-fashioned prostitution. At novel's end. Author Mandel feebly suggests that psychoanalysis may save her yet.

Immersed in the jazzy, sometimes obscene argot of the addicts and spiced with lurid episodes, Flee the Angry Strangers packs documentary punch but lacks point. Diane and her friends may need analysis; they need spunk and a spanking more.

* i.e., hep. But hep is no longer quite a hip word.

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