Paradise Lost

By R. Z. Sheppard

THE EDEN EXPRESS by MARK VONNEGUT 214 pages. Praeger. $8.95.

Vonnegut is not a bad name to have on a book if one is simply interested in marketing a name brand. But Mark Vonnegut, son of Kurt, has considerably more on his mind. He has been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Eden Express is his attempt to describe the slippage in and out of madness, to distinguish between the chaos in his head and the confusion of the world and, finally, to achieve a balance between romantic myths about sick minds and the cold evidence that his own disorder is the product of abnormal body chemistry. The result is not one of those bonkers-and-back melodramas. The young author does come to terms with his condition, but his book is written out of the reserve of lost innocence.

Vonnegut, 28, was wise to the ways of innocence. At Swarthmore College he majored in religion and registered as a conscientious objector. At his draft physical, his erratic behavior earned him 4-F military rating. Mark, his girl and some other friends then bought an abandoned farm in British Columbia.

Junk thought. No graduate of the Wharton School of Business ever pur sued his ambitions at IBM with as much single-mindedness. Mark had all the inverted status symbols: a trusty old Volkswagen, a loyal mongrel dog, a commune in a good neighborhood and a larder stuffed with choice grass and macrobiotic snacks. But there is a serpent in every Eden; Mark's was mental illness.

Small jobs tended to drag on for hours.

His attention span shrank to grasshopper proportions. He heard voices that told him his girl friend was dead, that his father had committed suicide.

Mark had to be put in the hospital three times. Thorazine, shock treatments, a high-protein diet, and vitamin therapy put him back in circulation. To day he is no longer a Canadian farmer but a student of biochemistry who plans to go to medical school.

Vonnegut seems more resigned to such a future than truly happy about it.

"I'm pretty sure I could live in a plastic condominium with a wife I didn't love and lots of bratty kids . . . I wouldn't like it but it wouldn't drive me nuts," he writes, unaware of the brattiness implied by such conjecture. Yet in the end, Eden Express is a painfully honest document of a life in transition. The shift is even evident in the book's style. The early pages contain the sort of hippie jargon that franchises experience into junk food for thought. But by the end, Vonnegut has found a truer, more subdued voice that reaches out of his agony and concern. It is not quite grace under pressure, but it is that necessary first step, growth under stress.

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