Biblical Overkill

FIVE SMOOTH STONES by Ann Fairbairn. 756 pages. Crown. $6.95.

American literature has often been starved for lack of a grand theme--a Tolstoyan war, a Flaubertian passion, a Jamesian conflict of cultures. The Ne gro revolution, at once violent and vital, agonizing and altruistic, could provide such a theme. Novelist Ann Fairbairn tries to tackle it in this ambitious, achingly overwritten epic. The result is a compelling argument for instant Black Power--if only to avert a sequel.

The five smooth stones of the title are the ones that David carried into battle against Goliath; using roughly 82,000 cliched words per stone, the author indulges in literary overkill, with her sling relentlessly aimed at the bestseller lists. Her hero is a young, hypersensitive Southern Negro named David, a genius, jazz virtuoso and cripple, who makes his way from a dresser-drawer crib in New Orleans to Harvard and Oxford, and back to the civil rights battlegrounds of the South. Her white characters, including a college cutup named Sudsy Sutherland and a heavy called OP Clete, seem to derive more from The Hardy Boys than from life; her Negro dialect is echt Amos 'n' Andy.

Consider David's first run-in with nasty white duplicity. At Pengard, an "integrated" Midwestern college, David manfully rejects the homosexual advances of Randy Clevenger, Virginia-born scion of "Southrun" aristocracy. Before anybody can say "tea and sodomy," David himself has been accused of perversion by the effete Dean of Men, whose name, for Pete's sake, is Merriweather Goodhue. Only by the intervention of a tough but noble leader named "Bull" Evans does the poor kid clear himself. Evans simply hires a private eye to prove that Dean Goodhue and Clevenger have been in, well, cahoots.

And so it creeps, from stale crisis to predictable denouement. Will David marry Sara Kent, the white artist who loves him despite race and rancor? Will he accept the tempting offer of a State Department post in seething black Africa? Or will he meet a martyr's fate under the gunsight of nasty OP Clete?

Ann Fairbairn is the nom de guerre for a 54-year-old California housewife. The publishers understandably are reluctant to disclose her real name.

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