Grey Humor

THE DO-GOODERS by Alfred Grossman. 229 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.

Nowhere is the literature of the put-on so prevalent as in the area of grey humor, the pale imitation of black humor. Kookiness serves for characterization, and unrelated zany episodes for story. The Do-Gooders exemplifies this genre, along with A Bad Man by Stanley Elkin and A Fine Madness by Elliott Baker. Manhattan-born Alfred Gross man, 41, who has written three other novels in the same vein, has been praised for his facility with a special, caviar kind of black humor that only the hip can hope to fully understand. Actually, The Do-Gooders is a variation of Terry Southern's amoral, completely antisocial Magic Christian, but it is also disastrously lacking in Southern's wild, anarchistic imagination.

The put-on characters sound intriguing. There is a rich, young widow, Marie Forbes, who yearns to do good by performing positive actions; she starts on her career "quite purposefully" killing her swinish husband with a heart attack --resulting presumably from sexual exertion. The author builds her characterization by having her use foul language as often as possible. But as Mark Twain once remarked of his wife's swearing, "she has the words but not the tune."

Marie meets up with Spider, a Sunday-school-tongued, sweet-guy Mafioso whose aim in life is to do good by negative actions. Spider halts the installation of Muzak broadcasting in the subways by threatening to unload garbage on the Muzak man's beach. Marie does her bit by joining a major political party and then subverting the party hacks by persuading slum dwellers to organize a rent strike. There are other liberal, square attacks on the illiberal squares, among them the rout of a women's march protesting the establishment of a neighborhood clinic for drug addicts.

Skull Wires. It is just barely possible that Marie and Spider are the targets of the satire, and not society, but the author's tone does not support this; it is so obvious that it doesn't support anything. It may also be argued that this is all part of a subtle master plan, as when novels are made boring to prove that the exquisitely bored characters that languish in them really find life boring. The danger in such cases is that one original, strikingly phrased thought could spoil the whole book. That pitfall has been avoided here.

There is more P. G. Wodehouse in The Do-Gooders than the deadly amoral wit of Bruce Jay Friedman or Joseph Heller. The true black humorists spring from Franz Kafka, Celine, James Joyce and Nathanael West. Imitations like this owe their origins to the pop-art Campbell soup cans, underground "art" movies, and the overpowering amplification systems that give rock music its driving force.

If nothing else, this novel shows that literature is perhaps the most Victorian of arts, the most difficult to mold into new patterns, the hardest to fake. Despite prophecies of the novel's doom, it may be that the old-fashioned virtues of story, characterization and dramatic prose exposition will keep it alive even after that millennium when TV is wired directly into everyone's skull.

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