Mutual Loathing

By Paul Gray

THE LADY FROM BOSTON by Tom McHale Doubleday; 304 pages; $8.95

The hero of Author Tom McHale's fifth novel is totally without redeeming social value. Dwight David Aldrich hails (of course) from Abilene, Kans.; not yet 30, he seems to have enraged everyone he has ever met. His ex-wife's prominent Boston lawyer father pays Aldrich $500 a month alimony to keep his distance--on a 500-acre retreat in Vermont. There, someone systematically blows up and burns down the "tumbledown Disney land" of a condominium that the remittance man has cynically thrown together on the site. An acquaintance Aldrich meets at a bar speaks for thousands when he complains, "You have lied, I think, at least once to everyone in New England."

If Aldrich's thoroughgoing rascality has a point, McHale refuses to hone it. Despite Dwight David's all-American name, McHale has not turned out a parable about the national dream. Middle America comes east, all right, but the meeting produces much mutual loathing and no visible significance. Instead, McHale seems simply to have taken much joy in producing the worst imaginable main character and surrounding him with the worst imaginable supporting cast.

Much of that joy is communicable.

Dwight's batty (and ultimately avenging) old aunt does several nice comic turns in the novel, once commiserating with her nephew on the curse of having been born an Aldrich: "That made you the inher itor of a long-established tradition of rascalry, thievery, sexual perversion, treason, sedition, blasphemy and apparently, in my case, gratuitous witchcraft." There are, preposterously, several Mohawk Indians involved in the plot, one of whom is named Sybaritic Hawk. Student demonstrations of the late '60s, ecological struggles, communes, civil rights trials, street life among urban porn establish ments, all have been dragged, entertainingly, into The Lady from Boston.

The price McHale pays for all this spectacle is credibility. Not for a nanosecond do Aldrich and enemies seem any thing more than what they are: the extravagant inventions of a spendthrift imagination. Sometimes McHale gives away too much. Sentences often peter out in persiflage: "At the corner of Tremont Street the detective chased off a gaggle of four queens with identical gold earrings who did an impromptu high-kick routine to a rhythm of contemptuous offerings aimed at the crowd of well-dressed and generally middle-aged couples descending the steps of the Shubert Theatre after the last performance who were now loading into taxis and private cars."

Any writing that can survive such pas sages deserves attention. Those who keep hoping that McHale.will return to the exuberant comedy and middle-class Catholic characters of his first two novels, Principato and Farragan's Retreat, will again be disappointed. McHale seems stubbornly determined not to repeat ear lier successes. In that respect, at least, The Lady from Boston succeeds. The novel will vex those who expect their reading matter to carry the freight of coherent meaning. Those who do not mind the voyeuristic experience of being interested but not concerned will find it a lot easier to take McHale.

--Paul Gray

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