Burial Rights

By Paul Gray

CITY OF THE DEAD

by HERBERT LIEBERMAN 416 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.95.

People of the squeamish persuasion are a beleaguered lot these days. Their views are anything but chic, and their sensibilities are battered about like straw men each time a new entertainment hurls ever more graphic violence ("Not for the squeamish!") at the public eye and viscera. Perhaps squeamishness lacks defenders because sneering at it is both fashionable and surefire box office.

With the appearance of Novelist Herbert Lieberman's City of the Dead, the faint of stomach are in for yet another assault on their feelings. Yet precisely because Lieberman's book, certifiably the shocker of the summer, speeds up the already overaccelerated trend toward limitless carnage, it vividly raises an old, unpopular question: Might not the squeamish have a point after all?

If City of the Dead could be simply taken as a story of municipal corruption, numbingly thorough detective work and a father's anguished attempt to rescue his daughter from some kidnapers, it would make a diverting, if overlong read. But despite the novel's remarkable skill and intensity, it cannot be so taken. What separates Lieberman's book from the general run of hard-boiled adventure fiction is its encyclopedic attention to the subject of human corpses.

In the novel Dr. Paul Konig is chief medical examiner of New York City and a world-famous expert in forensic pathology. He is thus in a position to view -- anatomically and microscopically -- the violence that human beings living in the city wreak upon one another.

Understandably, the experience has in stilled in Konig a morbid determinism that makes the Goncourt brothers look like Harpo and Chico Marx: "Gone now are February and March, season of drowned men, when ice on the frozen rivers melts, yielding up the winter's harvest of junkies, itinerants and prostitutes. Soon to come are July and August -- the jackknife months. Heat and homicide. Bullet holes, knife wounds, fatal garrotings, a grisly procession vomited out of the steamy ghettos of the inner city."

To prevent Konig's spirits from soaring unexpectedly, Lieberman saddles him with other problems: two incipient scandals in his own department and a particularly troublesome batch of mismatched body parts dredged up from the East River. As if all this were not enough, Konig's daughter has fallen into the hands of some hoodlum revolutionaries. They make Konig listen in on the phone while they torture her.

Gore and Sadism. These massive doses of gore and sadism can, of course, be modishly defended. The artist must be granted his subject; only his execution of it is up for review. Lieberman is simply following the novelistic tradition (begun by Daniel Defoe) of piling up the minutiae in order to tell society about its own workings. Horribly mangled bodies and autopsy rooms exist, as do the dispassionate technicians who must clean up the messes that others create.

Anyone who suggests that most of society might just as well remain ignorant of the reek of decay and formaldehyde is a prissy hypocrite who should be exposed to the cold light of artistic truth, etc., etc.

Yet it is no accident that civilization has made sacred rituals out of the decent burial of the dead. Individually and collectively, society may well be un able to endure a prolonged look at the physical aftereffects of death. The central mystery of existence -- the end that unites everyone even as it divides them -- cannot be reduced to ghoulish titillation without the possibility of serious consequences. Even in Shakespeare's most grotesque play, Titus Andronicus ("Enter a messenger with two heads and a hand"), the gruesome details are always treated as if they were unquestionably monstrous. But in City of the Dead the world is regarded as an autopsy table. Humanity is meat, whether dead or alive. To feel queasy in the presence of this book -- and the tendency it embodies -- is not necessarily prudish or cowardly.

When the corpse being dismembered is that of the human imagination, it may be courageous -- even necessary -- to avert one's eyes. Paul Gray

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.