Snake or Passion Pit?

THE CARETAKERS (404 pp.)--Dariel Telfer--Simon & Schuster ($4.50).

This is an angry first novel about the casual maltreatment of the insane in a Midwestern state asylum called Canterbury. The book's anger might be a great deal more effective if Author Telfer, who herself spent six years as a clerk in a state institution, did not keep abandoning the snake pit for the passion pit.

Low-budget Canterbury is a kind of unrest home where an inmate ekes out his life like an indeterminate prison sentence. Most of the attendants are too overworked and too unfeeling to do more than slap the patients into line. The wards are the circles of a neo-Dantean inferno. In Stationary, the patients are strapped into chairs to groan, curse and soil themselves through the day. In Hydro, a patient is wrapped mummy-fashion in icy wet sheets for 72 hours at a stretch. In the "untidy" wards the bedridden turn their heads obsessively from side to side, rubbing off the hair and even the skin from their scalps. Such weekly rituals as Bath Day, when the patients are divested of rubber bands, bits of tobacco and the last shreds of dignity, are recorded with repellent candor.

But when Author Telfer deserts the patients for their keepers, the fervent social reformer becomes a kind of madhouse Grace Metalious. Two nurse trainees, Kathy Hunter and Althea Home, develop identical crushes on Donovan Macleod, the strong, silent head doctor. Macleod is impervious, but his colleague, Dr. Larry Denning, is so "vigorously amorous" that he rips off Althea's dress one night and treats her to what he regards as therapeutic rape. Pretty soon both nurses are sleeping in beds they never made.

As it gets progressively unzippered emotionally, The Caretakers also goes melodramatically berserk. One patient chokes to death in neglect, one attendant is strangled by an inmate, and a lecherous doctor who impregnates a nymphomaniac patient has his skull crushed by the woman's husband. Such aphrodisiac antics strongly suggest that Author Telfer's characters--the sick as well as the supposedly healthy--need a 72-hour cool-off in Hydro. But as a document of conditions in many state hospitals for the insane, now undergoing some exciting reforms (TIME, Nov. 16), the book will shock as well as arouse compassion.

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