Charge-O-Maniac

BAD DEBTS by Geoffrey Wolff. 222 pages. Simon and Schuster. $5.95.

All his adult life, Benjamin Freeman has been on a buy-now-never-pay-later kick. At 55, he has rarely held a job; he collects elegant, useless gewgaws--custom-made pool cues, secret listening devices--mainly to solace his loneliness by substituting objects for friends. He has become, in fact, a confirmed charge-o-maniac, who seeks public notoriety and recognition by becoming the ultimate delinquent consumer in a consumption-mad society.

Such a character could easily have emerged as a mere cipher-caricature in a satiric, ham-handed social catalogue of the times. Not in this appealing first novel. Author Wolff, Newsweek's book editor, invokes Freeman and his long-suffering family with subtlety. Their relations with one another, it turns out, are also bad debts. His wife Ann, sexually and emotionally little more than an object of Freeman's consumption, has left him. His son Caxton, a conniving p.r. flack for a top political candidate, helps support his father--primarily because of the embarrassment the old man could cause by showing up in Washington. Freeman's cousin Gerrish, a money-mad but bumbling lawyer, acts as an unwilling buffer between the members of this emotionally bankrupt group.

Curiously--and convincingly--Wolff shows that it is the angry rogue in Freeman and his omnivorous vitality that somehow provide emotional support for his wife and son. In his outraged determination to exact from them the obligations that he feels due him, Freeman displays a savage despair that raises the book above the level of mundanity.

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