One Man's Family

THE ARRANGEMENT by Elia Kazan. 444 pages. Stein & Day. $6.95.

Can the sensitive, cigarette huckster son of a despotic Greek rug dealer find happiness with the sleep-around daughter of a small-town Dixie bigot? Well, sort of. If you give him 444 pages to work up to it.

A more important question is: How did Director Elia Kazan, whose America America was a moving and perceptive first novel, come to manufacture this muddled, massive mistake? Perhaps the answer lies in Kazan's past as an Academy Award-winning film maker. His publishers tried to make the most of it by throwing a splashy show-biz-style, pre-publication party aboard the liner France in New York Harbor, drawing everybody from Tennessee Williams to Andy Warhol; on paper, Kazan tries to make the most of it with splashy writing: dream sequences, yellowed letters, soliloquies to mirrors, toys-in-the-attic flashbacks, instant psychoanalysis, prose more often stream than consciousness.Only a few broodingly nostalgic childhood scenes hint of Kazan's larger writing talent.

Protagonist of all this dubious effort is a middle-aged account executive, Eddie Anderson, who was born Evangelos Topouzoglou. A would-be Tolstoy reduced to pushing Zephyr cigarettes for an advertising agency, Eddie also moonlights as Edward Arness, writer of hatchet jobs for slick magazines. Anderson-Topouzoglou-Arness is trapped in a Los Angeles "Spanish Renaissance ranch house" with a patient wife, a confused teen-age daughter, a supply of Picassos, tabs from the liquor store, and his mate's meddling analyst. "Asleep in the dell of respectability," he awakes with a whoop after making it with Gwen Hunt, a former Dixie-belle show gal turned Girl Friday Night for the ad-agency boss.

From then on, the chase involves much long-distance running over life's cluttered obstacle course. A-T-A brawls with Gwen's lovers, tosspots his way to jail, suffers a sanity hearing and the mental lockup, is finally divorced by his wife, who takes his money and marries his lawyer. En route, while his teen-age daughter is aborted in Mexico and takes a Negro lover, A-T-A himself participates in enough sex romps to satisfy born voyeurs, not to say the American Gynecological Society.

Moral of Kazan's story: "No one can live completely as he'd wish. We all pay something in time and in disgust for rent and for groceries. It's an arrangement you make with society, which is itself an arrangement, you understand?" Sure, but what else is new?

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