Nice Girls Don't

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE SEASON OF THE WITCH by James Leo Herlihy. 384 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95.

Incest, that most majestic of taboos, has had quite a literary run during the past few years. Nabokov's Ada, though not quite Pharaonic, elegantly proffered a half sister as better than none. Gore Vidal diddled the subject in Two Sisters, and if there was a moral to the convoluted enigmas of Anthony Burgess's MF, it was never commit incest without a conundrum.

Gloria Random does not need puzzles to approach the subject. The 17-year-old fugitive love child of James Leo (Midnight Cowboy) Herlihy's new novel finds that incest is purely and simply a bummer. Like her friends down at the crash pad, she handles problems with a jarring forthrightness:

"One of my hands was free. I touched the top of his head with it. 'Hank, listen to me.'

'Ssh, ssh, ssh! Dreams can't talk. You're a dream.'

'No. No I'm not.'

'Then why do I feel so good with you?'

'Do you really want to know?'

'Yes. Tell me.'

'Because you're my father,' I said."

It couldn't have happened to a more vulnerable guy. Hank Glyczwycz is a bitter middle-aged cynic. He was just beginning to loosen up to his students' sweet faith in love and peace highs when Gloria wrecks him with her disclosure. She is the forgotten illegitimate daughter from a distant love affair.

Gloria, who changes her name to Witch Gliz while on the ritual lam from Mom's suburban Detroit subdivision, learns by doing and then recording her doings in a breezy diary. Sex, dope, kindness, generosity and communal living are good things because they make her feel good. Fortunately, imminent incest gives off bad vibrations before the big clutch.

Too self-consciously the moral virgin and too facile with her received wisdoms and doubts, Gloria is far less lovable than such fictional older sisters as Christopher Isherwood's Sally Bowles (I Am a Camera) or Truman Capote's Holly Golightly (Breakfast at Tiffany's). Herlihy's lively stock characters and head-shop props come directly from Aquarius Central. Yet The Season of the Witch has its appeal, especially if regarded not as an adult book but a contribution to an as yet nonexistent publishing category--groovy books for juveniles.

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