Time to Shoot Santa

MAMA I LOVE You (245 pp.)--William Saroyan -- Atlantic-Little, Brown ($3.75).

If the collected works of William Saroyan--twelve full-length plays, seven novels and some 1,500 short stories--could be sap-boiled down to a single sentence, it would read, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus." In the days of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, The Time of Your Life and My Name Is Aram, Saroyan brought to this simple message an elfin charm, an infectiously wacky humor, and a flavor of childlike sweetness, as if his tales had been stolen from some happily hidden jam pot of life. But of late, the middle-aging (47) pixy of U.S. letters seems to have fallen into the writers' trap Kipling once spotted: "When you know what you can do, do something else." Mama I Love You is a near parody of what Saroyan could once do, and suggests that it is time for Saroyan to shoot Santa.

The story is a kind of grade-school fable told in the first person by the novel's nine-year-old heroine. The little girl's nickname is Twink. She is also nicknamed Frog, Dandelion, Grasshopper and Mrs. Nijinsky. Twink has a mother, Mama Girl, and a father, Papa Boy. Unfortunately, Mama Girl and Papa Boy are divorced, and Papa Boy lives in Paris with Twink's brother, Peter Bolivia Agriculture. Cause of the split, it seems, is that Mama Girl cannot put her mind to being a Wife Woman when her heart is set on being an Actress Broadway.

Twink and Mama Girl head for the bright lights of Manhattan, settle in servants' quarters at the Pierre Hotel, eat at the Automat, and feed the pigeons in Central Park. When Mama Girl's multimillionaire friend Gladys DuBarry, who suffers from "polio of the soulio," offers to house mother and daughter in a penthouse suite, Mama Girl proudly throws the DuBarry woman out on her earrings. But Mama Girl has to admit that all is not well: "I'm the most beautiful girl at every party; I meet all the producers and directors and writers and actors, but nobody jumps up and says he's got to have me in his play--nobody."

Then a kindly, grey-haired producer jumps up and says he's got to have Twink in his play: "The only people who can play children are children." The kindly producer's kindly playwright writes in a fat part for Mama Girl, and at the smash New York opening, who should turn up but Papa Boy and Peter Bolivia Agriculture. Curtain. Clinch.

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