Old Rut, New Pilgrim

YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW by David Benedictus. 187 pages. Dution. $3.95.

The pilgrimage from innocence to experience, or from the provinces to the city or from despair to salvation, is one of the more thoroughly traveled, heavily rutted highways of English fiction. John Bunyan drew up the road map--the Slough of Despond, the Valley of Humiliation, Doubting Castle--but British Novelist David Benedictus' second book is far from Bunyanesque. At its zany best it is more reminiscent of the wonderfully erratic pilgrimage to London of young Sam Bennet in Dylan Thomas' Adventures in the Skin Trade.

Benedictus' pilgrim is a bowlegged 22-year-old named Bernard Chanticleer who "lives by love but loves at random wherever his love will stick." He lives with his parents in a London suburb, and agrees to go to work as a shoe salesman in the big London store where his father is a department manager. His parents provide him with a bowler, a pinstripe, suit that conceals his bowlegs, nylon underwear that crackles when he walks, and a small "pied a terre" (or, foot in the grave) in Kensington. He learns the sales spiel handily enough ("A beautiful shoe, madam, seamless uppers, a discreet buckle and a soft dimple toe, and for a foot like yours with so little adhesion between the phalanges of the toe and the metatarsal joint . . ."), but he is desperately unhappy. Bernard has no friends. He burns with hopeless, timid lusts. He lingers before the posters advertising "Running Without a Stitch, a documentary record of the nudists' own Olympic games, filmed in all the glory of Cinemascope and Eastmancolour." But he dares not enter the theater for fear of being seen.

Inevitably, he meets a kind-hearted doxy--a bit actress named Barbara Darling, who invites him into her bed and tries, unsuccessfully, to teach him a few rudimentary sexual tricks. Nevertheless, he spends a long, happy weekend with Barbara before losing her to a "doggish window dresser with a great hanging face, pouches, pendulous lip, bum, turn, dewlap, the lot."

Novelist Benedictus, who had a solidly scandalous success with a first novel, The Fourth of June, about the seamier side of public-school life, unfolds his story with brevity and considerable wit. He has a fine comic flair for translating the mechanized absurdities of big-city life into visions of surrealist fantasy. But in the last chapters of You're a Big Boy Now, his story loses its fine farcical edge, and he makes the fatal mistake of taking his hero seriously. He would have done well to keep in mind a famous aphorism observed by Evelyn Waugh: "Never apologize. Never explain."

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