For Strong Stomachs

STATIONS by Burt Blechman. 137 pages. Random House. $3.95.

Violence in the subways is an up-to-the-minute topic for the enterprising young novelist, and in skilled hands could certainly be transformed into a recognizable allegory for the tensions that haunt the urbanized world. But to turn such an allegory simultaneously into a surrealistic re-enactment of Christ's Passion, as Novelist Blechman has done, will strike many readers as blasphemy. The novel is also perverse, obscure, flagrantly obscene. It is thus sure to arouse revulsion--but those with strong stomachs may find it fascinating at the same time. For it is redeemed by a white-hot anger, an inescapable moral intensity, and surprising effectiveness in reaching for an impossible goal.

Rarely since James Joyce have the levels of puzzlement been laid on so thick. The "stations" of the title are, among other things: 1) a series of 14 Manhattan subway stations, describing a cruciform route, compulsively traveled one night by a homosexual voyeur who is fleeing from a grafting vice-squad detective; 2) the 14 Stations of the Cross; 3) the nightly rounds of a nurse; 4) the comfort stations at the subway stops. Every step of the book is dense in meanings and associations, helped on by rhymes, incantatory metrical effects, and puns that ring with a wild echolalia. The result is a fierce compression that largely explains the book's partial success.

Blechman's first novel was a funny and sparely written example of that familiar genre, the satiric comedy of Jewish urban life. Stations is far more ambitious, and if it fails at last--too heavy, too short to teach the reader the symbols, and yet sometimes too obvious--it is more arresting than the bland small successes that are published by the dozen each week.

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