Talking It Out

EACH OTHER'S VICTIMS by Milton Travers. 128 pages. Scribner. $5.95.

Today's version of the Great American Tragedy is teen-age drug addiction. Milton Travers is a pseudonymous magazine writer whose 18-year-old son Ricky became a speed freak and vanished into New York's East Village. In Each Other's Victims, Travers describes how he tracked Ricky down and tried to rescue him. He is brisk, professional and explicit--about his son's life as an addict, about his own confused, guilt-soaked reactions, about the grubby details of the drug culture, or at least that part of it involving amphetamines. Except for a spectacular denouement (Papa dropping Librium, son suffering amphetamine withdrawal, both jabbering Oedipal home truths as they cross Washington Square, drunk on drugs and adrenalin), the book is totally convincing. One emerges unnerved from Travers' nightmare. Seen through a screen of mind-blown local color, hell really seems to be located somewhere east of Second Avenue.

Any reader is likely to know that already. The question is raised: What is the point of a book whose principal characteristic is a kind of aggressive, self-destructive candor? Travers clearly deserves sympathy and even, to a degree, admiration. After all, he sticks by his son and eventually saves him. Yet a nagging sense of mixed motives, the author's and the reader's, keeps intruding.

Frayed Nerve Endings. Similar accounts--how-not-to-do-it manuals for frightened parents--are customarily welcomed on the grounds of public utility. Each Other's Victims will probably be so welcomed too. At any rate, the author apparently makes this assumption. He sedulously offers nuggets of information: "One physician estimates that five years is probably a long life span for a practicing speed freak." He also hazards scary opinion: "There are something like seven million college students in the country, and God knows how many millions of kids in high school, probably five, six times as many. I would guess that of that total alone, an absolute minimum of 50% have used [marijuana]--and more than at just one zonked out party." But Travers is also plainly aware that drugs are very good copy--after finding his son, he promptly got an assignment for a magazine article on the drug scene.

The author's confusion is our own. American nerve ends are so frayed these days that it is impossible to read anything about teen-age addiction without being touched, without involuntarily plunging around in it looking for ourselves, for our children, brothers, sisters, friends, as well as for reassurances and clues. In the end this book and the reader's reaction to it may both be symptoms of an incorrigible American tendency to expose and eventually trivialize deep, personal agonies, to exorcise fear by talking about it to anyone who will listen. Each Other's Victims is not a very good book; what it says about the U.S. inadvertently may be worse.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.