Cop-Out

By R. Z. S.

THE DICK by Bruce Jay Friedman. 310 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

Like most of the walking wounded in the novels, stories and plays of Bruce Jay Friedman, Kenneth LePeters is a smudge of ethnic traditions, sexual and racial conflicts, and the internal bleeding caused by the status game -- America's most dangerous contact sport.

Specifically, he is a secret Jew, fear ful of exposure, who holds one of the most ambiguous pseudo jobs ever dissembled by the mind of organization man. He clips murder stories from news papers for a homicide bureau in a large Eastern city. Neither true dick nor full flack, he keeps his gun at the office and carries a "badgette" rather than the big tin of real homicide men.

If LePeters' identity is built on a cultural fault line, the characters around him are bizarre monoliths. His boss, Bruno Glober, spends working hours slathering over skin magazines and evenings spreading around huge sums of cash raked in from an interest in an international slacks cartel. The homicide squad itself includes such legends of cop-hood as Detective Teener, who has been so chipped away by criminals' bullets that his body is composed almost entirely of spare parts, and Detective Medici, the Dean of Child Molestation. Put with all the robust vulgarity and double-entendre that Bruce Friedman obviously intends, the book's central issue is: Can 40-year-old Ken LePeters get his parts together long enough to become a full-blooded American Dick?

The question can be taken or left for what it is as long as Friedman sticks to the mimicry of detective-story dialogue, journalism cliches, police-blotter prose, and the series of burlesque lech-skits that give The Dick its basic shape. But when, as he does at the end, Friedman tries to graft existential pur pose onto his low-comedy hero, the ques tion becomes an embarrassment. Any second banana could have told him it wouldn't shtik.

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