Fertile Void

THE EMPIRE CITY (618 pp.)--Paul Goodman--Bobbs-Merrill ($6.95).

Little Horatio has figured it out. When the teacher registers him for the first day of school, he waits until she is not looking, steals the card, and scrams. "If you catch them at the neat minute," he explains, "there is no record in the whole world!" For about 20 years, no one gets Horatio's number (his full name, by no coincidence, is Horatio Alger), and he prowls Manhattan a free man, without diploma, social security, draft or credit card, without compensation for employment or unemployment, without driver's license or vaccination certificate. The authorities finally nail Horatio--his unnumbered presence appears as a sort of vacuum in the city's graph of relief funds--but during his period of free fall he acquires, like Candide, an extensive and liberal education.

The boy takes his learning where he finds it, slowly works out a philosophy ("Never Make an Offer. Budge only for Folding Money"). But he is no cynic, and he cross-questions would-be disillusioners sharply: "Now accordin' to you the newspapers ain't reliable. Is The Times lies? But if it's gonna lie anyway, why is it so borin'?" At eleven, Horatio knew "the local civics of the vice squad ... In architecture, how to make time bombs; in interpersonal relations, how to make zip guns ... In philosophy he knew that the Future Lies Ahead of Us, yet--alas--One Thing Leads to Another."

Much of the book uses reality merely as a springboard toward fantasy; characters may suddenly levitate or turn into werewolves. Also, there are boggy tracts that sound, and no doubt are meant to sound, like ads for Rosicrucianism ("large increments of love are released that are fermenting in the Fertile Void"). What emerges is an allegory on whatever the reader chooses--the perversity of man, the bright illusion of love, the red-eyed aurochs of war. Dotted throughout the book are moon-mad digressions--a plan to enroll farm boys in the Joy Scouts of America, hike them into Harlem for instruction in reefer rolling; a 14-page hypothesis, mostly in verse, on why Ireland is underpopulated (it wasn't the snakes, Goodman theorizes, that nearsighted St. Patrick banished).

In a note to his publisher, the writer of this ironic romance observes that "I guess I'm the least known author of my ability in America." The titles of some of his previous books (Gestalt Therapy, Art and Social Nature) suggest why. But in this novel, Author Goodman shows an impressive gift for fiction. His prose is strong-flavored and exact, his comedy is caustic. Still, for all its humor, The Empire City bulges like a diplodocus. The first of its four overlong, sometimes aimless books was begun in 1939, and Goodman says he may yet write another volume if he can find something else for Horatio to do. Really needed: not more adventures for Horatio but more discipline for Author Goodman's sprawling talent.

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