Shadow of the Beast

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE ASSASSINS by ELIA KAZAN 311 pages. Stein & Day. $7.95.

Elia Kazan, of stage and screen, broke into bestselling novel writing five years ago with The Arrangement, in which a middle-aged adman turns intellectual and works up a healthy sweat over old values and a new woman. The prose was rough cut; the characters were slabs of emotional cliches. Kazan was not out to master the novel form but to overwhelm it on his way to the movie script.

The Assassins fits a similar pattern, except now Kazan's subject is the whole United States of America--as a terminal case. Military hardware lies slowly disintegrating in the desert, the law softens and bends, violence flourishes, youths rot their minds with chemicals. This is certainly not the country of Kazan's autobiographical novel America America, the young immigrant's dream and fulfillment. In the new book, a father tells his acidhead son, "If you want to live a big life, get a big cause," and the kid doesn't know what his father is talking about.

Father and son are but two members of a numerous and all but unmanageable cast of characters, whose problems range from life and death to the merits of stocks v. tax-free municipal bonds. The main story line--the one that will remain after most of the rest of the plot has been cut away for a workable script--is about a Mexican-American Air Force sergeant who shoots and kills a hippie drug dealer on a military base in the Southwest. The longhair, a local counterculture idol, had deflowered the sergeant's rambling rose of a daughter.

The straight community regards the Chicano as a hero who did the red-blooded American thing. The Air Force regards the matter as a no-win proposition. If the sergeant goes free, it might appear that military men are privileged as killers. If he is punished, the community will be outraged.

Only the sergeant remains calm. He killed out of anger, and is perfectly willing to pay for it. But nothing is simple any more. Justice gets lost in a welter of lawyers' ambitions and personal problems, fatal misunderstandings, official deception and senseless violence. Anything resembling youthful idealism, compassion or hope either gets destroyed or freaks out.

Yeats' rough beast again? No, Kazan's -- a shaggy stage prop animated by mechanical grunts and dramatizing the sort of pseudo realism that Vivien Leigh may have had in mind when she once described Kazan as "the kind of man who sends a suit out to be cleaned and rumpled."

. R.Z. Sheppard

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