Quality in Quantity

NEW AMERICAN REVIEW: NUMBER 1. 288 pages. New American Library. 95-c- (Limited hard-cover edition: $5.)

In the '50s, drugstore racks blossomed with a literary phenomenon: paperback-book magazines--a lively blend of avant-garde fiction and nonfiction, poetry and criticism. In effect, the p.b.m. was a mass-distributed little magazine, a brave effort to sell quality in quantity. Commercially, it soon flopped.

Now the New American Library, which published New World Writing in that era, has revived the paperback-book magazine as a triannual bloom. If the first issue of New American Review is any indication, it is well worth another run for the money.

N.A.R.'s fiction roams imaginatively over a wide landscape--from a Kafkaesque account of a prisoner-of-war interrogation in Viet Nam by Victor Kolpacoff to a bittersweet rendition of a mother's day in Washington Square Park by Grace Paley ("Kitty has three green-eyed daughters and they aren't that great . . . they are no worse than the average gifted, sensitive child of a wholehearted mother and half-a-dozen transient fathers").

Jewish Blues. In other short stories, Ronald Sukenick coolly chronicles a tale about some free-floating hippies flying "an impossible, ultimate kite" over the East River; and Philip Roth incants a Newark ghetto boyhood in The Jewish Blues. ("The goyim pretended to be something special, while we were actually their moral superiors. And what made us superior was precisely the hatred and the disrespect they lavished so willingly upon us!").

The essays are generally impressive. While Critic Richard Oilman deftly shoots down MacBird!, Historian Theodore Roszak wades into "The Complacencies of the Academy: 1967" with a spirited attack on today's professors for abnegating their traditional responsibility as philosophes. Instead of serving as the community's moral conscience, Roszak charges, most academics now function as multiversity service-station attendants, filling up students with credits and subjects, fretting about nothing more profound than their own tenure and sabbaticals.

Adding to the ferment, two pieces sharply disagree. Stanley Kauffmann explains how he got jobbed by the New York Times for trying to do "serious drama criticism" during his brief tour there last year. By contrast, Benjamin DeMott attacks Kauffmann's most discussed criticism: the two articles he did for the Sunday Times accusing homosexual playwrights of always trying to"invent a two-sex version of the one-sex experience." As DeMott sees it, the homosexuals contribute a valid theatrical experience --"a steady consciousness of a dark side of love."

Independent Course. The roster of contributing poets includes Alan Dugan, Anne Sexton, John Ashbery, Rob ert Graves, and Richard Eberhart. But no single verse stands out as much as "Cottonmouth Country," some simple post-Lowellite lines by 24-year-old Louise Gluck:

Fish bones walked the waves off Hatteras.

And there were other signs That Death wooed us, by water, wooed us By land: among the pines An uncurled cottonmouth that rolled on moss Reared in the polluted air.

Birth, not death, is the hard loss.

I know, I also left a skin there.

Taken in sips or in a single heady draft, N.A.R.'s first issue is more than just a sequel to New World Writing.

With former Book Week Editor Theo dore Solotaroff at the editorial helm, it is trying to steer a sprightly yet sober course--between being a vessel of the mad moment and a steady bearer of lasting literature. If it sometimes flounders in confusion, N.A.R., Number 1 is a more than welcome sight on current publishing waters, which are elsewhere choked with literary junks.

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