Graduate School

LOVE, ROGER by Charles Webb. 188 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $4.95.

The relationship between cinema and the novel has long been a give-and-take proposition, with the novel mostly the giver. Every once in a redeeming while, a novelist of potential import who otherwise might have been lost in the publishing shuffle, comes to the top of the deck when the movies make a deal for his book. Charles Webb, the 29-year-old Californian whose first novel, The Graduate, was largely overlooked and generally underrated before its matriculation into the phenomenally successful movie, is just such a case.

Webb's sophomore novel, Love, Roger, gives strong evidence of a highly developed, idiosyncratic talent. Webb's own stylistic way is to understate flatly for sharp effects, using cool deadpan as the mask of subdued hysteria until a matter-of-fact shrug can convey the fury of a glass-shattering scream. He can repeat trivia until the very act of repetition assumes an eerie importance of its own. In short, like a gentile Bruce Jay Friedman, Webb's view is unremittingly that of a super-realist--or the typical paranoid --who feels in the marrow of his quivering bones that the commonplace is the true turf of the absurd.

Roger Hart, the title hero, is a WASP nebech hectically becalmed in the midst of his beginning through life's journey. A graduate of a Maine college, the Coast Guard and a stint of cross-country hitchhiking, Roger wants desperately only to play it safe, having resolved that "the most important thing in life was to be stable, to have a stable feeling." Though he is heading in no particular direction, he has both routinized and organized his insecurities by going to work for a Boston travel agency. There, emptying ash trays, guiding tours, handing out brochures, he actively pursues his policy of indecision.

His idle idyll, of course, is doomed to end. In quick succession, Roger, who can have any girl who wants him, finds himself the object of three predatory females. The first is a kook from Carolina, with whom he enjoys a heavenly coupling in the bedding section of a Boston department store during an overnight lock-in. The morning after, however, she vanishes almost inexplicably ("What I didn't get to tell you last night is that I'm sort of a crazy person").

Next, Roger goes to the dogs--or a dog track--where he is picked up by a nobly funny whore. A compulsive bedroom talker, Roger keeps nervously gabbing away while the dark lady of the greyhound night frantically tries to ply her trade. Finally, Roger is also seduced at his place of employment by a virginal Wisconsin nursing student who believes in following the instructions in sex manuals to the proverbial letter ("There's a chapter that says it's best not to do it in a bed the first time"). When Roger progresses with her to a proper pad, the Carolina kook reappears. Unable to choose between them, he has both girls settle for him at the same time: "I mean it's absurd not to try things," suggests the kook before the three go off to house-hunt together.

Oblique Humor. With this slender story, Webb, to be sure, tries few new or venturesome things. As in The Graduate, his hero is caught up in a drift. Predatory female characters give life to adolescent fantasies. Webb once more relies too often on the device of staging private scenes in public places. Yet he consistently displays oblique humor and the genuine novelist's gift of making minute humdrum incidents seem new. At the dog track Roger goes up to a refreshment stand for a second beer, holding out his old cup to the counter girl: "She looked at my face a moment, then turned toward a man behind her who was flipping over a row of hot dogs on a griddle. 'Lou? He brought his cup back,' she said. 'Should I use it again or give him a new one?' Lou stepped over with his spatula and removed the cup from my hand. 'Don't bring your cup back,' he said to me. He dropped it in a trash barrel. 'You never use the old cup. Give him a new one.' He went back to the griddle."

Any writer who can make such a brew-ha out of an old beer cup is entitled to use his plots, scenes and characters a second time.

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