Drang nach Osten

THE ROAD TO OOBLIADOOH by Fritz Rudolf Fries, 246 pages. McGraw-Hill $6.95.

The people's republic of East Germany has already produced one gifted novelist, Uwe Johnson (Speculations About Jakob). Now, in Fritz Fries, it may have the makings of another. But where Johnson's austere prose was deeply ingrained with the drab, isolated atmosphere of East Germany not long after the war, Fries turns out to be a far more frivolous and cosmopolitan creature. His first novel is officially set in Leipzig, Fries and his characters, though, seem to belong to the new international Bruederschaft of the educated, disenchanted young, who uneasily share pop culture and rock music with peers from Vladivostok to Valparaiso.

Though they do not know it at first, they would be just as itchily and angrily at home nearly anywhere else as they are in dreary old Leipzig. Fries' hero, Arlecq, escapes to West Berlin in search of Oobliadooh, a storied dreamland delineated in song by Dizzy Gillespie, a prince of bebop. Sickened by the banalities of Communist bureaucracy, Arlecq looks forward to the delights of the West (or "the WEST," as he put it). When he finally does reach Oobliadooh, he finds things just as unsatisfactory as they were back home. "I must insist on a little more enthusiasm," his friend and fellow refugee Paasch says severely. So back they go, testifying, as Arlecq notes, to their "good citizenship by an unqualified return to our workersandpeasants state."

Echoes From Heroes. In some ways, the book is a compendium of fashionably youthful flaws. Both illusive and allusive, it is often ultra-literary in just the wrong sort of way--full of echoes from the author's literary heroes, T. S. Eliot, Proust and Truman Capote. There are also resonances from Joseph Heller. One can imagine Heller's Captain Yossarian, sitting up there in the sky, cursing the night, as the U.S. Air Force drops a bomb in the garden that Arlecq recollects from his own childhood. "It is still a good eight weeks till Easter," Fries writes, "but Arlecq's uncle in America has sent this early Easter egg."

Fries and his characters are archly precious, their story willfully disjointed in the telling. Elegantly bored, they spend much of their time lounging in bed or bars, or leafing through the works of Marx, Lenin and Stalin in the public library to find pages mutilated or subversive notations made by angrier, cruder objectors to the System. Yet as Arlecq drifts from reflections on jazz music, to two desultory love affairs, to a funeral, to scenes from the failed marriage of a friend, the author manages some artful acts that reveal the writer behind the discontented esthete. Moments of fiction materialize, coolly precise, sharp and fresh as the crinkle of ice that can be skimmed from the edge of a winter puddle. Fries, moreover, can write about love without sounding like a clod or a pornographer.

Even Fries' humor sounds crisp, though its predictable source lies in the absurdity of the current scene and the pretentious twaddle of all establishments, whether founded upon outworn socialist unrealities or rampant democratic rhetoric. Arlecq puts in a stint as a government guide, conducting a party of Indonesian comrades from Goethe's shrine in Weimar to the Buchenwald concentration camp where, in spite of his efforts, the Indonesians beam and smile, mistaking it for a prehistory museum. He also works as an interpreter at an international conference. When the Cuban spokesman takes the floor, Arlecq switches off the sound and improvises: "The general theme was as simple as a school essay: Cuba and North American imperialism . . . When Arlecq switched on the sound again they were both, the speaker and he, still uttering the same things, their lines of thought converging in the struggle for world peace. The delegates responded with a standing ovation."

As message, this is just medium. But seeing all adult confabulation as a sort of predictable Punch-and-Judy show is now the universal indulgence of the unindulgent young.

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