Catcher in the Rice

CLOWN ON FIRE by Aaron Judah. 211 pages. Dial. $4.50.

The reader will quickly recognize him as a literary cousin of Holden Caulfield.

--Jacket blurb

I mean I recognized the goddam kid right away. He's my Jewish-Indian literary cousin Joe Hosea, the one who got thrown out of prep school in Bombay because the phonies thought he was trying to burn down the school. A very big deal. I mean all he did was drop a match in a pile of wood shavings in the carpentry shed. Then my literary aunt and uncle packed him off to military school. Way off in the Himalayas, for Chrissake.

Alienated. What really knocks me out about old Joe is he is a moron just like I was when I got the axe at Pencey Prep. I mean he's really irresponsible. My Aunt Nina wants him to be a Disraeli or something, but Joe's ambition is to be a khutmul Mao. If you must know, that's a person rich Hindus hire to lie in their beds at home while they go on holiday so the bedbugs will have somebody to bite. Joe's a terrific liar, so you never know when he's kidding around. I mean he's a madman. Joe's always horsing around doing things like converting to Mohammedanism at the lousy military school up in the goddam mountains so he can sleep with his Muslim classmate's sister, who he's never even seen, for God's sake. I mean Joe's really alienated.

There's a lot of that Santha Rama Rau crud in the front of the book about old Joe's family and how they came to India from Poland or Lithuania and all. His mother is always telling Joe to tuck his goddam shirt in, but she's mostly wrapped up in all the swell work she's doing for the Bombay chapter of the Hadassah and worrying about her daughters marrying some Buddhist. His father--Sir Abraham for Chrissake--is a King's Counsel, a lawyer who's only interested in making money. Boy, that's one thing Joe is really ambivalent about. "I hated the poor because they had no money," he says, "and the rich because they had."

Please Be My Guru. The part of Clown on Fire that really kills me is Joe trying to find himself. I mean he looks all over India. That's because he's depressed as hell about life and how hard it is to make meaningful relationships with people! It knocks me out the way he's always asking people, "Will you be my guru?" I know it sounds like one of those windy New Yorker stories about sensitive teen-agers growing up in India wearing pith helmets instead of red hunting hats. But Joe is telling it the way it really is, effendi.

This hell of a book about my cousin was written by some English writer named Aaron Judah. It is the second of three novels on the Hosea family, but the first to be printed in the U.S. For this one, Judah got a Dial Press Fellowship Award for Fiction, whatever that is. The publisher says it's to encourage young authors. Judah is 43 already, for Chrissake. It's supposed to be goddam secret how much the fellowship pays, but the fact is Dial gave this Judah less than a thousand dollars. That's not very encouraging for someone who is really a very funny writer. And I mean that sincerely, even if it is true that I wrote a story like this myself way back in '51 when 1 was just a kid.

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