Socks Washed in Tears

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? by Gilbert Rogin. 260 pages. Random House. $6.95.

Q. What is Singer trying to tell us?

A. You mean Singer, the anti-hero of Gilbert Rogin's new comic novel, whose wife peeks out shyly from under the closet door while he ponders what his life, if any, may mean?

Q. She doesn't peek, she waggles a finger. And it's not a novel, even if the dust jacket says it is; it's a wadded-up ball of short stories.

A. Well-crafted, however?

Q. Well-wadded, and very funny. But what's Singer up to?

A. He suspects that life matters, but that it doesn't matter that it matters.

Q. Nobody likes a smart head.

A. Okay, he's figured out that life doesn't matter, but it matters that it doesn't matter.

(Questioner and answerer resolve themselves into two halves of the Bemused Reader, who finds himself in the bathroom--where Rogin's characters seem to spend a good deal of time --staring into the mirror and mouthing the same word over and over again until it empties of meaning: "Velleity. Velleity. Velleity . . .")

It is a word that has to be looked up to be appreciated. "Velleity: volition in its weakest form." Rogin applies it proudly and neatly to his man Singer, a magazine writer becalmed somewhere around 40. Although his outlook is "upper-middle-class, Upper West Side,

Jewish-Ethical Culture," Singer is not unhappy. He is, in fact, "the most cheerful depressed person" he knows. But he has lost the thread.

In search of it, of whatever it is that binds random events together to make lives, he regards with wonder his wife, his stepchildren, his potted palm, his parents and even his ineffectual sperm (under his doctor's microscope they wriggle torpidly, like sunbathers). "Singer's wife is washing Singer's socks in the kitchen sink and weeping prodigally," a fairly typical episode begins. "Singer watches . . . He pays attention to the great, submerged tangle of black socks, mid-calf length; his wife's red, vehement face; her tears dropping at intervals into the murky water. He thinks: My socks are washed in her tears. What a heavy responsibility!"

Heavy indeed, but what to make of it? Nothing at all. Singer's life seems just as queer and unstrung to him in episode 22 as it did in the first. Likely it will stay that way. His father, who has a better grip on things, remarks: "Sometimes I stand back and look at you as though you're a piece of sculpture I'm carving." Singer protests that the carving is finished. His father agrees, perhaps ruefully: "There's a point when it's too late to change the concept. There's not enough material left."

Under the Bed. Take three fixed points: Philip Roth. John Cheever, Peter De Vries. Rogin is somewhere in the triangle they describe, nearer to Cheever than the others. Rogin shares Cheever's awareness of risk, his sense that to turn a corner of the banal may be to find oneself in a howling waste of strangeness.

This astringent strangeness allows Rogin to clown outrageously without losing control. Singer's parents invade his bedchamber one Sunday morning. His wife finds the conversation unproductive and resettles herself under the bed. The conversation continues, and then Singer gets out of bed and joins his wife. Zooey Glass and his mother come to mind. The slapstick works as well for Rogin as it did for Salinger.

It is hard to stop picking out the raisins from this amiable book. A last one: Singer, distracted, finds himself standing at the door of his stepdaughter's room. She is a messy teenager, scornful, baffling. She asks, after a time, what he is doing. "Taking stock," he flips back, quick on the uptake.

She looks at him and says, "Again?"

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