Heckzapoppin

By R.Z. Sheppard

AMERICAN MISCHIEF by ALAN LELCHUK 501 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $8.95.

For those who missed the pre-publication publicity, Alan Lelchuk's American Mischief is the novel in which Norman Mailer is shot to death by a young radical intellectual who obviously read An American Dream but forgot to close the cover before striking.

Mailer was outraged by the scene in which a character bearing his name, rank and serial number was shot by a punk recruit. Furthermore, the bullet was fired into the very end of his digestive tract from a range that politely can only be called pointblank. At a meeting of lawyers and publishers, Mailer offered to reduce Lelchuk to "a hank of hair and some fillings." That literary phrase turned out to be a pretty good description of the novel itself.

Despite selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club and advance compliments from Lelchuk's friend Philip Roth, American Mischief is not much more than another exploitive, topical novel. Lelchuk romps through the confusions and contradictions of today's beleaguered values--marriage, democracy, individualism--like a gratuitous looter in a cultural disaster area.

Ground zero is Boston and its environs, which Lelchuk turns into a combination Sodom and St. Petersburg on the eve of the Russian Revolution. His characters even faction off nicely into modern American equivalents of Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and Nihilists, with Lenny Pincus, a subway Trotsky from Brooklyn, hopelessly trying to keep two feet in all three camps.

Pincus is an ex-student at Cardoza College (read Brandeis, where Lelchuk teaches English). But the first half of the book belongs to Pincus' former teacher Bernard Kovell, the school's 35-year-old humanities dean. By day Kovell is the model liberal, upholding the life of the mind and responsibility to the commonweal. By night he juggles his "family" of six girl friends. Most of the girls have an illustrative neurosis. But after more than 100 pages of Kovell's describing his curative powers in tedious Deep Throat detail, it is time to reconsider H.L. Mencken's endorsement of monogamy as convenient and hygienic.

Compared with Kovell, Pincus is a puritan. He seems satisfied with joylessly initiating one 14-year-old virgin and watching her take up with heroin. Pincus' passion is for revolution and cultivating flowers of evil from all the standard humanities-department seed catalogues. He is an organizer of the destruction of art in local museums and the burning of Harvard's Widener Library. He kills Mailer, further extending those justifications for hell raising that Mailer himself borrowed from Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, et al.

The next step for Pincus and his guerrilla band of young suburban terrorists and ghetto scholarship dropouts is to kidnap ten of the nation's leading intellectuals. Here Lelchuk plays it safe by identifying them only as A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and Kovell. The plan is to "de-mandarinize" the elders at a secret New Hampshire hideout. This promising situation is not fulfilled with much imagination or wit. Pincus' fate is equally drab: prison, where he is reduced to suffering from a chronic earache.

The author seems to want to satirize the visceral and cultural preoccupations of liberal intellectuals in the '60s. But lacking an authentic bite, he winds up proving only that he is one of the fastest lips in the East.

--R.Z. Sheppard

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