Don't Touch That Dial!

By R.I. Sheppard

THE DICK GIBSON SHOW by Stanley Elkin. 335 pages. Random House. $6.95.

"Though hypocrisy can take you far, it can only take you so far," says Dick Gibson, the protean-enriched radio personality of Stanley Elkin's third novel. It is one of those ebullient statements that instantly sprouts provocative questions: How far do you want to go? Who will you be when you get there?

The Dick Gibson of the title, a seriocomic straight man in a burlesque mythology of mass culture, wants to go all the way. But not vertically (to a network presidency), or even horizontally to become one of those tympanic coast-to-coast voices that always "seem to speak from the frontiers of commitment." Instead, like the wrestler in Elkin's first novel (Boswell) and the department store owner in his second (A Bad Man), Gibson craves the all-points dimension of human need.

An itinerant early media man, he has worked for dozens of small-town radio stations. As the perpetual apprentice, whetting his skills and adopting names and accents to suit geography, he evolves into part of American folklore. As Dick Gibson, the paradox of his truest identity is that he is from Nowhere, U.S.A. "Regionless my placeless vowels, my sourceless consonants," Gibson ululates into the silence and emptiness--the somber and pervasive background of life that is Elkin's real concern. Like Scheherazade, Gibson holds fate off with talk, "life-giving and meaningless and sweet as appetite."

Between radio jobs, there are respites of sorts. Gibson spends a year as a phony invalid in a convalescent home where he enthusiastically joins the shut-in life. "Until you've potato-raced against a congenital one-legged man in a sack you haven't potato-raced," he boasts after an invalid decathlon.

As he ripens into middle age, Gibson's bizarre experiences become more public. He conducts an all-night talk show on which his guests blurt out their secret lives. A college professor whose sexual advances were rebuffed by a tough ten-year-old singing star turns to frantic logic: "Helen of Troy was nine . . . Psyche was six. When you come right down to it, how old could Eve have been--a day, two days?"

Gibson hits his peak as the star of Night Letters, a telephone participation show. Audience feedback creates a web of involvement and expands radio to almost mythic proportions. Spinning his dials and monitoring the tape delay device that censors callers' obscenities, Gibson is a McLuhan obfuscation made flesh--a benevolent witch doctor in an electronic village of the lonely, the sick and screwed up.

The Dick Gibson Show, like Portnoy's Complaint, contains enough comic material for a dozen nightclub acts. Yet it is considerably more than an entertainment. The banal and the profound, the vulgar and the touching, are humanely juggled into a vital blur--a brilliant approximation of what it is like to live with one's eyes and ears constantly open.

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