Visitor to a Small Planet

SUPERNATION AT PEACE AND WAR by Dan Wakefield. 252 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $5.95.

Students of the ridiculous will be gratified to learn that the city mothers of Phoenix, Ariz., some months ago organized a Mothers' March Against Topless. That is not quite as gratifying, perhaps, as would have been the news of a Topless March Against Mothers.

But the T.M.A.M. will surely happen sooner or later. In the meantime, the M.M.A.T. meets the minimum daily requirement for absurdity, without which life in these troubled times would degenerate into meaningfulness.

There are many splendid absurdities in Dan Wakefield's book, as well as horrors, ironies, incongruities, hypocrisies and examples of pathological normality. All were lovingly culled by Wakefield, a freelance journalist, during a four-month discovery tour of the state of the nation, or supernation, as he archly calls it.

The reader learns, for instance, about a "pretty young girl" living in Cambridge, Mass., who is warned by the reporter that LSD may cause birth defects in her children. She replies: "So what, the children will be screwed-up anyway."

In Detroit, a man named Lobsinger tells a Lions Club meeting that the ghetto riots there were "training exercises" for a Communist takeover of the U.S., and that prudent citizens should 1) arm themselves, and 2) lay in a one-month supply of beans, canned foods, brewers' yeast, pet food, evaporated milk, whisky, toilet paper, soap and "haircutting tools" for use during the coming disorders. After the meeting, a club member tells Wakefield: "Hell, on my block we're already armed."

In Oakland, Calif., at a meeting of the Sexual Freedom League, Wakefield learns from a middle-aged lady that single men are not allowed in the sketching class, because some of them showed up and "didn't really sketch at all, but just looked at the model in a--well, in a disturbing way." In Grand Rapids, he reads a letter sent by a G.I. who died in Viet Nam: "Don't worry about me, Momma, all the Viet Congs in the world couldn't keep me from coming home."

Modest Conclusions. Wakefield's Supernation began life as a superstory in the Atlantic, filling nearly all of one issue. A subjective oddity is that in the Atlantic, it seemed weighty and formidable, one of those worthy projects the reader sets aside for a time when his mind and calendar are clear. But in hard cover, the text seems brief and often irritatingly superficial. Wakefield's viewpoint wavers. At times he is the visitor to a small planet--aloof, amused, rational, watching the antics of the savages. A few pages later, stumbling into earnestness, he takes the tone of a housewife who majored in political science writing a letter to the editor of the New York Times.

Wakefield is an incurable essayist. He takes the sting out of his reporting chapters with neatly balanced explanations of the self-evident. An absurdity is either absurd or it is not; a horror brings on the gag reflex or it does not. What reporting there is seems true enough, though Wakefield's modest conclusions will startle few ordinarily demanding readers. But a competently drawn nostril, ear lobe and eyebrow do not add up even to a sketchy portrait; the well-fed, worried face of supernation deserves a better effort.

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