Mad World! Mad Kings!

PSYCHOPATHS by ALAN HARRINGTON 288 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.95.

Why does Joy, the ex-wife of a famous actor, have an affair with a crude young waiter named Vincent? And why does Vincent keep beating her up?

Why does Lewis Hoaglund, the conglomerate tycoon who likes to fire people as brutally as possible, have a huge machine in his backyard that has no function except to clank and sputter?

Why does Lore feel that she has to spend her evenings tutoring young Paul in English? And why did Paul first kill Lore's dog and then attack her and set her house on fire?

Because they're all psychopaths, says Alan Harrington. About 20 years ago, Harrington wrote an extraordinary novel called The Revelations of Dr. Modesto, which told of a young man's efforts to live by Dr. Modesto's mysterious philosophy of "centrism." If one could get to the center of any given situation, the center of any office or even any street corner, then success would inevitably follow. Customers rushed up to the successful centrist and demanded to buy whatever he was selling--life insurance policies, even neckties. But the young man felt a certain hollowness at the center of his life, and so he set out to find Dr. Modesto. At the very center of the U.S., he found an insane asylum, and as he approached it, he saw other gray-suited centrists streaming toward it from all directions; and in the central cell of the asylum, he finally saw the mad figure of Dr. Modesto, who cried out: "Let my sons in!"

Since then, Harrington, 53, has sampled and written about many varieties of American life. He worked for a time in the public relations department of a gigantic corporation (Life in the Crystal Palace), and he indulged in the New York LSD scene (The Secret Swinger). Throughout his adventures--he has now taken refuge with a wife and two children in an adobe cottage near Tucson, Ariz.--he has remained obsessed with the vision of Dr. Modesto, that we all live in the conditions stated by Falconbridge in King John: "Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition!"

There once was an age of reason, Harrington believes, in which Western civilization subscribed to the bourgeois standards -- work hard, seek virtue -- and it naturally condemned the psychopath as a madman (the Marquis de Sade) or an outlaw (Billy the Kid). But throughout most of this century, he argues, the psychopaths have been gaining -- first tolerated, now triumphant as dictators of the contemporary style of life.

The psychopath, as Harrington defines him, is not just an exaggerated version of the neurotic, afraid to walk under a ladder. He is the new man, free from either anxiety or remorse, cold, bored, self-isolated, adventurous, seductive when he wants to be. Or as Harrington lists some types: "Drunkards and forgers, addicts, flower children . . . Mafia loan shark battering his victim, charming actor, murderer, nomadic guitarist, hustling politician, the saint who lies down in front of tractors, icily dominating Nobel Prize winner stealing credit from laboratory assistants . . . all, all doing their thing."

In this more or less nonfiction book, Harrington illustrates his thesis with a number of pseudonymous melodramas (Joy, Hoaglund and the rest), but he has a difficult time in trying to figure out what we should do about "the outlaws [who] have arrived massively on our scene and now confront us."

The first line of defense is what less high-strung observers might call simple paranoia. Harrington himself tells the story of visiting a friend in San Francisco and pulling down the blinds because, he says, "I found myself explaining that in the exposed living room I made too easy a target." But at the end the author also finds himself explaining that psychopaths have certain valuable qualities: their daring mocks our caution, their sense of self shames our self-effacement. Swept on by his own rhetoric, Harrington concludes with a bizarre version of the New Mysticism, in which the psychopath and the good soldier both partake in a hallucinogenic communion at what he calls the Church of Rebirth. After all those exhortations, however, one finds oneself agreeing with the friend who discovered Harring ton in the darkened living room in San Francisco. " 'For Christ's sake!' he shouted, yanking open the blinds. 'How can you live that way?' "

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