Two for the Road

GOING NOWHERE by Alvin Greenberg. 143 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.95.

EVERYBODY KNOWS AND NOBODY CARES by Mason Smith. 213 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

Hemingway pointed the way: perfection of style was the writer's road to salvation--or at least to survival. If it did not overripen, as style tends to do, it might occasionally reveal what Papa called "the real thing." Mason Smith and Alvin Greenberg, two promising stylists and fledgling novelists, each offer one for the road. Both books have hitchhiking protagonists who abandon cloisters of respectability for the unexpected. But there the similarities end.

The story of Going Nowhere is absurd, but Greenberg's good, tight fable is told with a warm, comic logic reminiscent of early Vonnegut. Arthur, a brilliant physics student, loses a leg in an unlikely series of events. Disconsolate, he becomes a hitchhiker. For ten years he lives on the random kindness of motorists, until his old mentor, Professor Melville, contacts him with an ambitious proposal. The prof wants to launch Arthur in a modest flying saucer and return him to earth as an interplanetary proselytizer for a new philosophy known as Unteleology. It disclaims any overriding purpose or plan in the universe and urges people to stop worrying because nothing is going anywhere.

Minimal Man. Unfortunately, Unteleology falls victim to the randomness it preaches, and Arthur eventually returns to the side of the road. His subsequent adventures--including the loss of his other leg--leave him in much the same state as contemporary art. He is a minimal man trying to make more out of less. At the end of the book, Arthur is snug in an abandoned church with a girl who seems to symbolize science as a dead-end faith. The couple eats whatever falls off passing produce trucks, and Arthur amuses himself by composing epigrams from an incomplete alphabet of movable letters on the church bulletin board. Greenberg's philosophical cartooning is a bit overly contrived, but it succeeds because Greenberg keeps his tale both tactful and short.

A sense of proportion is among

Mason Smith's many strengths as a novelist. In tone, texture and pace, Everybody Knows and Nobody Cares is that rarity, a book with no false moves. Smith's hero is Ogden Jones, a Ph.D. candidate in English with a loved and loving wife and three nice children. Discontent with an academic future does not gnaw at him; it nibbles in a stimulating way. So with sleeping bag, fly rod and the warm wishes of wife and kids, he temporarily lights out to what is now the territory behind --the America of high places, crystal air and honeyed waters. It is nature's nation, which has inspired American writing from Thoreau through early Hemingway.

Grace Without Pressure. Ogden knows it, and so does Mason Smith. In a variation of Nick Adams' trout-fishing scene in Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River, Smith pays tribute to the old man with an exquisite parody of his style. It is done with the same sense of casual gratitude that a young hippie might express when accepting his father's old Army overcoat.

The scene perfectly illustrates the grace without pressure that Ogden displays on almost every page. It is there when he hops in and out of strange automobiles, instantly gauging and adapting to the interior emotional atmosphere. It is there when he hooks up with Erin, a delectable, thoroughly greened girl hitchhiker. In their sexual encounters they are more playful than passionate: getting there is more important, and more fun, than making it. Drinking in the natural and human wonders that pass their way, Ogden and Erin relish a dream that neither they nor Smith believe could--or should--last too long: a second adolescence enriched by the experience of adulthood.

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