The Dickens in Camp

AMERICAN SCRAPBOOK by Jerome Charyn. Ml pages. Viking. $4.95.

Not the least of the novelist's functions is to serve as a moral bookkeeper, making all those entries on the liability side of the ledger that a society might otherwise prefer to forget. In his new book, ruefully comic Novelist Jerome Charyn (Once Upon a Droshky) records the shape and the existence of a small, dreadful chapter in our recent national history.

The incident on which the novel is based occurred in 1942, when the fearful U.S. was so busy remembering the threats and wrongs of Pearl Harbor that it busily forgot the rights of many Americans of Japanese descent. They were cruelly uprooted from their homes and arbitrarily herded together in relocation camps. In a shameful, repple-depple kind of limbo families were sundered and gentle spirits destroyed.

Author Charyn zooms in upon the Tanaka family, Niseis held at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California. Switching angles and changing focuses, splicing bits and pieces sharp as shards, he re-creates their barbed world in a manner often confusing but finally effective. With their mother dispatched to another relocation camp i,n Montana, the father has abdicated his paterfamilias function. Instead, Fumiko, an older married sister, tries to hold the assorted family together: Ruby, a 13-year-old kid sister who becomes pregnant; Napoleon, her kid brother who dreams of becoming a Navy bombardier; Chuichi, a bitter boy who has been summarily dropped out of an American Army paratroop unit. Harold, a literate older brother, irreverently sabotages the ultra-patriotic camp newspaper by inventing a comic-strip character known as "the Nippon Pimpernel." Against an otherworldly background of Screenland magazines, Baby Ruth candy bars, and zoot suiters jitterbugging to the music of "the Jive Bombers, the true Mi-kados of swing," camp life is not all camp. The prisoners are soon polarized into two groups. On the one hand are the Super Japanese, paying homage to the Emperor and extolling Yamato da-mashii, the Japanese fighting spirit. On the other are Super Americans, holding war-bond rallies and combat-volunteer recruitment drives.

In apocalyptic scenes, the two confused armies clash with each other and the authorities. Guerrilla insurgencies and uncivil wars break out. No one wins and everybody loses as Japanese beat on Japanese and Americans attack Americans.

Author Charyn knows how to make a pratfall out of a pitfall, how to convert sordid realism into a sort of surrealism. The residual moral is as harrowing as the punch line of a good black-humor joke is meant to be--what cruelly absurd ends men are capable of reaching simply by being cool and reasonable.

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