Name of the Game

POOR DEVILS by David Ely. 332 pages. Houghton Miffin. $5.95.

The difficulty with trying to govern by games theory is that some people don't want to play. What is worse, some people don't even know they are in a game. It is the job of the mathematicians, systems analysts and directors at a government-sponsored foundation involved in Project Nomad to get everybody into their game--or at least reduce to a minimum the chances of irrational, unpredictable moves by nonplayers, mostly the poor and angry urban masses.

But what of unpredictable moves by the people who make the rules? Despite batteries of computers and mountains of probability charts, Nomad did not count on the sudden defection of its most important employee, Carl Lundquist. An aging social scientist, Lundquist knows all the secrets and strategies of Nomad. He also combines the stature of a Vardis Fisher mountain man with Gunnar Myrdal's scholarship, Saul Alinsky's cogs-and-wheels knowledge of the impoverished and disaffected, and Walt Whitman's passion for undeodorized reality. As a cantankerous, outspoken symbol of the unindexed human spirit, Lundquist is too dangerous to be allowed to roam the nation's slums, migrant-labor camps and mined-out hills. He might stir up the animals, or give them dangerous lessons in non-gamesmanship.

Rutted Life. The man who becomes helplessly entwined in the search for Lundquist also proves to be an unexpected dropout. A 35-year-old professor of American history with a set of well-thumbed, uncontroversial lecture notes, Aaron Bell seemed passively content with this rutted life. A one-dimensional wife and a father and grandfather wasted by moral lethargy and televiewing did not make him appear out of the ordinary. But by the time he locates Lundquist living in the primitive, unwashed exile of a remote Appalachian cabin, Bell has also discovered himself--or what he calls the Lundquist within.

The mission fails. Lundquist remains at large. Bell stumbles back into Nomad's hands. But no amount of truth serum pumped into him by Nomad can cure him of exposure. Physical hardship, and the bitter fervor and wild-goat odor of the corpus Lundquist, have quickened his sense of human possibilities. He comes to believe that--contrary to the Declaration of Independence--happiness is not a goal to be pursued but something that overtakes a man only when he hits his full stride.

David Ely commits his familiar allegory with finesse, the same imaginative energy and nimble prose that marked his previous contributions to social-science fiction, Seconds, The Tour and Time Out, a collection of short stories. If Poor Devils suffers, it is from an excess of padding and marginal rumination. But they are not enough to blunt the book's theme: the enormous human need to feel valuable in a dangerous, complex world, where men are numbed or manipulated by remote control for what may or may not be their own good. As embodied in the aggressively bathless Carl Lundquist, the theme lingers like Whitman's line, "the scent of these armpits is aroma finer than prayer." The sentiment is a noble one, but like Poor Devils itself, not likely to be taken too seriously in a society that seeks salvation by spraying together.

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