Hippogriffs and Zombies

By Geoffrey Wolff

THE AUTOGRAPH HOUND by JOHN LAHR 239 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Read one way, maybe the wrong way, The Autograph Hound is a cliche checklist of comic Americana. It's set near Times Square (funny on the face of it, no?), and much of the action passes in an Italian restaurant where the Puerto Rican headwaiter is tricked out to look like a cowboy. The autograph hound is Benny Walsh, a busboy at a big Broadway restaurant called the Homestead. His girl friend Gloria burbles about cottages for two, aspires to break into show biz, but acts in skin flicks. What Aristotle would call the complication is simplicity itself: Benny, who is about to lose his job, has a chance to put in a fix with the head of his union. For $350 and a case of Scotch he can get a job in a more fashionable eatery. Should he sell his priceless autographs to buy himself a shot at new celebrities?

Well, all this is not the kind of material that helps the writer up Parnassus. John Lahr is a fine writer and a theater critic of enviable intelligence, however. His laudable aim is merely to provide a bit of fun. Lahr, 31, is best known for his marvelous biography of his father, Bert Lahr. In The Autograph Hound, one-liners accumulate. Someone tells Benny that cooking is just like life. "Cooking's not like life," he snaps. "If you get a bad meal, you don't have to eat it." The corrupt union leader is mod. He's written for Management News and he "goes very well with his rug." We learn that Otto Preminger's "making the life story of the Pope. It's called Pope. They're filming in Spain. Catholics are cheaper there."

Benny's obsession with celebrities and their commonplaces is finally inflated by the author and even charged with a kind of spurious nobility. The question --should Benny sell out?--begins as a joke, a preposterous dilemma. Then Lahr's sympathy for Benny, Lahr's eagerness to lend his characters dignity, beats away the japes, and what began as a joke ends in bloodshed and sadness.

Better to have left it laughing.

Lahr looks for America in the extreme situation. Benny sells his body to a hospital; he wanders the great city of America bumping into "weirdos dressed like Indians or Hunters or Afri can Warriors or Buddhist types who look you in the eye and sing to you." Increasingly, American fiction takes for its raw material things unearthly and bizarre. It is as though Nathanael West's Day of the Locust has been translated from a metaphor for lunacy into a lit mus test of reality.

Not so long ago, freaks had the power to shock and terrify. Now, be cause they have been too often dis played they are, at best, diversions. As a gathering place for hippogriffs and zombies, as the setting for a novel, Times Square is good for horselaughs.

But the truth about this country is more conventionally got up, quieter, or more extraordinarily lunatic. Geoffrey Wolff

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