High Jinks in Hell

TRIUMPH (277 pp.)--Philip Wylie--Doubleday ($4.50).

Polemicist Philip Wylie has found a subject more forbidding than Mom. It is the possibility of human extinction by nuclear warfare. Triumph is his second novel dedicated to his new cause. In Tomorrow (TIME, Jan. 18, 1954) 20 million Americans were wiped out. Thanks to the progress of science since then, the survivors in Triumph are just twelve men and women and two children (aged 9 and 12) out of the whole U.S. population. Europe, Russia and China are extinct, and only the Southern Hemisphere survives. Offshore cobalt time mines render the blackened U.S. uninhabitable for a long, long time with a million roentgen radioactive fallout.

This should be the most horrible book ever written. Actually, thanks to Wylie's jaunty, business-as-usual prose, the effect is quite different. As long as there is a novelist with the old know-how, all is not lost. The reader of this Tom-Swift-in-Hell story has the choice of a dozen characters with whom it should be a privilege to identify. There is this tycoon, an old Walter Huston type, rich enough to dig a two or three hundred million dollar fur-lined funk hole under his Connecticut Shangrila. There is his nice ginny wife. And (what larks in the ark in this subterranean Ararat) his mistress. A Jewish nuclear physicist clever enough to work the survival gear and brave enough to make like a space comic hero in an asbestos suit along the hot galleries of the shelter. The tycoon's blonde daughter. The tycoon's colored butler--old-fashioned enough to do a bit of praying. The butler's honey-colored sexpot daughter. The Japanese gardener's son. A dreamy Hawaiian-Chinese girl. An Italian-American gangster-gigolo type with a switch knife. A gas-meter reader. An Ivy League dope engaged to the tycoon's daughter.

The reader is well ahead of these cartoon types: half the book is over before they have grasped the fact that there are no outside commitments whatever left to keep them all from integrating in the nicest way. But the children (abandoned by Wylie's old enemy--their Mom) have the right word for all this horror show. "Geography," they say as they tend their lessons down below. "Geography, fui!" Also, history, philosophy, art, science and probably theology. In the outcome of the Wylie fable, all these little things are left in the hands of the Australians.

While giving full credit to Wylie's expertise (he has acted as some kind of consultant in the civil defense program), connoisseurs of this kind of proliferating work will probably prefer the one about a breed of carnivorous plants who are chomping up the world, or the one that postulates the disappearance of all the oceans like bath water going down the drain.

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