Id-Olatry

By * T.E. Kalem

THE DICE MAN by Luke Rhinehart. 305 pages. Morrow. $6.95.

Middle-age panic is an adrenaline that flows through many American novels. The hero's symptoms seldom vary. The taste of a stale marriage is on his lips. A run-of-the-treadmill job is under his feet. Falling hair is in his comb, and gray rather than great expectations cloud his eyes. Literary ways of dealing with this theme naturally vary. The approach chosen by Luke Rhinehart for his first novel is to consider the middle-age heebie-jeebies as a condition of the soul, angst-laden with boredom and despair.

The Dice Man is a blackly comic amusement park of a book, replete with vertiginous roller coaster rides of the spirit, feverish omnisexual trips through the tunnel of love, and crazy images reflected in the distorting fun-house mirrors of the mind. The master and slave of this berserk carnival is a psychiatrist named Luke Rhinehart, after the pseudonymous author, whose real name is George Cockcroft. Cockcroft took the hero's name as his pen name "because the book is in part autobiographical and I wanted to force the reader to take the book more seriously than he would a novel." Luke is a square who learns to live by the cube. One night, after a small, drunken party, he resolves that if a die that lies hidden under a playing card has a one facing up, he will rape his best friend's wife.

Fine Mimicry. It does, and he does. It turns out that the lady is far from unwilling, since she has a bad case of middle-age milgrims herself, and her pedantic husband is a desultory bedmate. From that time on, Luke has power and fate in the palm of his hand. He jots down options, usually from one to six, and abides by the roll of the dice. What the dice-ordained life gives Luke is a sense of euphoric irresponsibility and almost infinite possibilities. When the dice order Luke to jog up and down in his office clad in track shorts, the action merely enhances his swiftly growing reputation for eccentricity. But the command to role-play a homosexual means venturing into an unknown area of experience. Luke's awkward attempts to get picked up in a Greenwich Village bar are more raffishly droll than anyone might anticipate.

Inevitably the novel itself is ruled by chance. Some sequences click, and others clunk. Much dice-induced motivation is suspect. Luke might have left his wife and children without ever touching the dice. Even when the plot dawdles, Rhinehart's language and humor exert their wiles. Though he leans more to wisecrack than to wit, he gets off fine mimicrys of TV talk shows, journalistic deepthink and professorial psychoanalytic jargon. Between sheets (the book is copiously copulative), Rhinehart works up a positively Joycean lather-blather.

Whenever The Dice Man lapses into missionary zealotry, prepare for rampant naivete. Anarchy is not the joyous freedom that Rhinehart takes it to be, nor does the cure for civilization's discontents lie in an idolatry. However, the book could be a boon to games-minded hostesses. During a lull at the next party, try serving dice in the martinis.

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