Beak and Wing

By Christopher Porterfield

THE HAWK IS DYING

by HARRY CREWS

226 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

This gleefully savage little novel introduces fiction's most dedicated bird freak since Augie March swept through Mexico with an eagle in tow. George Gattling, an otherwise sober, hardworking owner of an auto-seatcover business in Gainesville, Fla., is determined to train a red-tailed chicken hawk, which he keeps perched on his wrist. Frequently consulting his talismanic text, The Art of Falconry by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, George croons to the hawk, fasts when it fasts, even takes it with him when he goes to bed with his girl friend.

Is this any way for a middle-aged Rotarian to get back in touch with the rhythms of nature and put some order in his life? Novelist Crews (Car, Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit) makes it seem so. George's devotion to the austringer's discipline may be a little crazed, but Crews suggests that any obsession is better than inane passivity. And the latter quality is all that George can see in the Southern Gothic remnants who make up his family and friends. As George passes through a series of farcial set pieces (a woozy pot-smoking session at a residence for Florida State University students, a ghastly 4 a.m. confrontation with an embalmer in a mortuary), everything except the hawk seems to him as phony as his girl friend's orgasms.

Crews works too hard to make the quasi-symbolic figure of the hawk dominate the book. When the bird is finally trained, Crews' assertion that George has achieved harmony with "some immutable continuity" rings more of rhetoric than of convincing fiction. But much of the time Crews maintains the kind of control that extracts full shock value from an episode while at the same time making it seem hilarious. George's retarded 22-year-old nephew Fred, for example, falls asleep while smoking in his waterbed and somehow manages to drown. . Christopher Porterfield

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.