You Must Go Home Again

DON'T STOP THE CARNIVAL by Herman Wouk. 395 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.

A novel that starts with the map of an imaginary tropical island makes a delicious promise of enchantment--as every reader knows who ever pored over the frontispiece chart in Treasure Island. Novelist Herman Wouk knows the pull of that enchantment. Six years ago, he fled the Manhattan theatrical and literary world, scene of his last two books (Youngblood Hawke and Marjorie Morningstar), and took his family to live in the Virgin Islands. His new novel, set in the Caribbean, begins enticingly with a map.

Reader, beware. Wouk is writing for grownups, and he has a murky, modern, antiromantic intelligence. The promise of enchantment is fulfilled only in irony. His coral cuts, his sandy beaches are alive with stinging sand flies. His ocean has sharks and floating garbage. His only pirate is a boozy, busted corporate raider named Lester Atlas, who staggers into every scene with a yo-ho-ho and a rum and tonic. His hero is a middle-aged (49) New York Jew with a heart condition. The result is not romance but farce laced with tears.

Brisk Disasters. Norman Paperman is a successful smalltime Broadway pressagent. His gift is for talk, not action. His dream is to get away from job, winter, phony people and their "Death Row" wait for heart disease or cancer "or one of the less predictable trapdoors" to get them. He comes to an uncommercialized Caribbean island called Amerigo. He falls in love with a rundown resort. The owner has it up for sale. Atlas offers to back him. The poor sap says yes.

Disasters follow briskly. Ants. Unions. Overflowing toilets. Insufficient rain. A crooked contractor. A love affair with an alcoholic actress. Insufficient working capital. Island politics. And then an earthquake cracks the cistern that holds the resort's entire water supply, the naive native bankers turn out to be as rapacious as barracudas, and a key employee goes homicidally mad.

This is really the world of TV situation comedy (Wouk once wrote for Fred Allen's old radio show). Some of the gags and sketches and disasters are effective. A few are pretty funny. Almost none are new material, and the reader soon begins to feel the kind of embarrassment reserved for tired, middle-aged vaudeville performers who try to jog-trot up to the microphone with the spring of real youth.

Chains of the Past. Somehow the reader reads on, for at least Author Wouk moves this minor work along in pleasant, soft-shoe style, very welcome .after the heaviness of Youngblood Hawke. And beneath the sagging routines can sometimes be seen a man with a message who got lost. Wouk is no longer at heart a comic writer. He is a moralizer. The burden of his moral is that a man is what he has been: he can do little, perhaps nothing, to break the chains of the past.

Wouk makes the point in countless small ways throughout Don't Stop the Carnival, as he has in other novels. He makes it with clumsy finality at Carnival's end, when Paperman has apparently mastered all the disasters of Amerigo. At that moment, the senseless accidental death of his actress mistress jerks him out of his dream of a tropical paradise. He realizes that what he really wants is to go back where he belongs, back to the wintry but real world of New York. Tearfully, he does.

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