Friend and Foil

By Philip Herrera

CUTTER AND BONE

by NEWTON THORNBURG

313 pages. Little, Brown. $8.95.

Keep an eye on Newton Thornburg. He has followed his first, rather clumsy effort, To Die in California (1972), with a fine second novel that is tense, funny and despairing. Its literary persuasiveness is generated by an extraordinary pair of characters who sound derivative and unprepossessing but run away with the book. Alex Cutter is a disfigured cripple; in Viet Nam he lost an arm, a leg and an eye. As if to make up for these missing parts, he is a full-time resister and iconoclast who loudly lacerates the world with mockery. His friend and foil is Rich Bone, a handsome and once successful corporate executive who sees life's flaws so clearly that he has retreated to become a sort of passive picaro. Bone bums around the beaches of Santa Barbara, Calif., lives off a succession of women and wearily hopes that "something will happen. Something will change."

It does. Late one night he glimpses a man stuffing what turns out to be the body of a murdered girl into a trash can. Though the view is only in silhouette, Bone has enough of a sense of the man to gasp "It's him!" when later he sees a newspaper photo of Tycoon J.J. Wolfe, a cornpone millionaire from the Ozarks. Such a flash of recognition would, of course, never persuade any court of Wolfe's guilt. But Bone's pal Cutter is convinced--perhaps because he associates the Wolfe type with those who sent him to Viet Nam. He devises a reckless plan to blackmail the millionaire. Bone objects that "extortion is a crime." Shrugs Cutter: "So's murder."

Desperate Hedonism. Is J.J. Wolfe really the murderer? Through most of the book, neither Bone nor the reader can be quite sure, though circumstantial evidence certainly points that way. In any case. Bone cannot stop Cutter's quest for "justice." True to form, he tags along through a series of manic misadventures involving more sex and booze than sleuthing. Tension mounts. Can respectable Wolfe be responsible for the fire that guts Cutter's house and kills his girl and their baby son? Finally the odd pair journey to Wolfe's home in Missouri--and doom.

The novel's form--pursuit and confrontation--owes much to the conventional thriller. But Cutter and Bone is much more than skillful entertainment. The places and people ring true, from the desperate hedonism of coastal California, "where America kept trying out the future," to the Ozarks heartland, where piety and patriotism barely camouflage a native instinct for violence. Cutter and Bone's own story is charged with a kind of passionate cynicism that makes even grotesques seem likable and, more important, credible right up to the last, startling sentence. Philip Herrera

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