The Wattage of Inertia

THE FILE ON STANLEY PATTON BUCHTA by Irvin Faust. 274 pages. Random House. $5.95.

Good-looking, personable Stanley Patton Buchta, the lead in Irvin Faust's second novel, practices a special kind of fantasy. He believes in little except himself. Unfortunately, that self is mainly composed of pop-culture fragments, miscellaneous emotions and loose social ties. A New York City policeman who was raised in California and saw combat with the Army in Viet Nam, Stanley is an American tumbleweed of no discernible ethnic background. He is a composite of what Author Faust apparently takes to be typical urban America--rootless, tough, guiltlessly selfish and easily moved by chance winds.

After the Army, Stanley drifted into college on the G.I. Bill. He dropped out just as easily to join the police force after aiding three patrolmen who had been attacked by a street mob. Being a policeman is simply a job. Stanley performs it with the same detached competence he displayed shooting Vietnamese. But the civil service turns out not to be the secure coop it once was. Racism and radical politics have besieged its encrusted prerogatives and cherished prejudices. Many policemen respond to the situation by joining Alamo, an unofficial organization dedicated to superpatriotism and the myth of the white man's burden. Alamos take solemn loyalty oaths and watch slides of the Boxer Rebellion. One member pines for the time when "Watts was the plural of a unit of electrical power" and "Detroit was a baseball team." For security reasons, all assume code names, such as MacArthur (Douglas), Crockett (Davy), Wayne (John) and Roosevelt (Theodore). History and Hollywood are given equal credibility ratings.

Polarized Women. Stanley, out of the inertia of good-fellowship, shuffles into this scene and is given the name Scott (Winfield). Then he is selected by the chief inspector to infiltrate the Brothers Under the Constitution, a group of radicals bent on preventing the construction of a school on Randall's Island. Without any convictions to mask, Stanley has little difficulty joining up. In fact, the only thing polarized in Stanley's life is his women. Heidi from Queens is sweet, roundish and compliant. Darleen from Harlem is bitter, lithe and defiant. Why does she go out with

Stanley? "Well," she tells him, "I am curious, black."

Faust's characters frequently define themselves through movie references. Much of the novel, in fact, could be regarded as a highly inventive, sardonic paraphrasing of Zulu, a 1964 Technicolor extravaganza about the bloody exertions of a British outpost to defend itself against human waves of frenzied black warriors. This particularly holds for the novel's ending, a melodramatic surrealization of a ghetto uprising.

Pathetic Realities. Although Faust dramatizes--and frequently overdrama-tizes--the tragic preposterousness of all extremism, he is never a cold-blooded satirist. He understands why people do what they do because he understands and respects their passions--or lack of them. A guidance counselor in a New York area high school, he previously brought his tart brand of empathy to bear in Roar Lion Roar, a collection of short stories, and The Steagle, his first novel.

In both books, he flashed an audacious talent for defining the pathetic realities of his characters through their consuming fantasies. There is the impoverished Puerto Rican youth of the collection's title story who identifies so completely with Columbia University that he gets a job in the boiler room of its gym so he can pump life "across the street to the coeds in their floppy shorts." In The Steagle, a middle-aged Jewish intellectual is so sexed up by the danger and tension of the Cuban missile crisis that he launches himself on an id trip through America, touching nearly all tangible and mythic pop-culture bases. Stanley is a far cooler but more disturbing character. Death and destruction reach him only as grainy replays of the old movies in his mind.

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