Killing Time on Cape Cod

By Paul Gray

TOUGH GUYS DON'T DANCE by Norman Mailer Random House; 229 pages; $16.95

The title seems to invite snappy responses. Oh yeah? Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, either, and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. But it takes Author Norman Mailer only a few pages to dispel any notion that he is dealing in parody, self-or otherwise. Tough Guys Don't Dance is, for openers, an engaging murder mystery, vividly set in a locale (Provincetown, Mass.) that Mailer, a sometime homeowner there, knows as well as the back of his fist. The book also raises questions besides whodunit. Among them: What, if anything, does being male or female mean at this late date in the 20th century? Can the American dream survive , money and luxury? Are the outlaws t or the good guys on the side of immutable law? Mailer has, of course, discussed all of these matters before, in many of his 22 previous books and countless interviews. But he has never sublimated his preoccupations so thoroughly into fuel for engrossing fiction.

Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer approaching 40, grieves over the departure of Patty Lareine, the wealthy wife whom he loves and hates to distraction. It is November, and the tip of Cape Cod retains nothing of its summer weekend splendors: "Provincetown was as colorful then as St.-Tropez, and as dirty by Sunday evening as Coney Island." Confused and lonely, Madden stalks the deserted streets and dunes by day and repairs in the evening to a local restaurant, where he sits in the bar and drinks too much. He is conscious of his new status as an unaccompanied stag and approves of the fear the waitress seems to feel in his presence: "In the days when I used to be a bartender, I had watched over a few customers like myself. They never bothered you until they did. Then the room could get smashed."

One night, well into his routine, he spots an attractive blond who reminds him of his wife; Madden joins her and her escort, learns that he is a lawyer and that both of them are visiting from California. Madden makes a conversational play for the woman before his memory blacks out. The next morning he wakes up with a hangover and a new tattoo on his right arm; he discovers that the passenger seat in his Porsche is covered with blood. Then the acting police chief calls him in and suggests that Madden move his hidden cache of marijuana before state troopers bust him. When he attempts to comply,

Madden finds a plastic bag containing, to his horror, a blond and severed head. Madden lacks the nerve, at this point, to identify the remains.

Aficionados of the detective form will recognize the puzzle: Is the putative hero, a man who boasts of his capacity for violence, guilty of a foul deed, or has he been set up? Mailer, following the time-honored script, soon comes up with a number of suspects for Madden to worry about besides himself. Patty's ex-husband, her unwilling benefactor after a nasty divorce trial, shows up; so, Madden hears, has Patty herself, along with the man she ran away with three weeks earlier. Madden discovers that the woman he loved before he met Patty is married to the acting chief, who steered him toward the evidence of murder in the first place. As if they were summoned by bloodshed, mystics, crazies, drug dealers and the sexually unusual swarm about Provincetown, that spit of land where the Pilgrims first touched down before setting sail for the firmer mooring of Plymouth Rock. Says Madden, trying to find his place in a proliferation of evidence: "I'm tangled up in coincidences."

In this genre, that is pretty much what they all say. But Mailer is not trying to excuse either Madden or his own extremely fortuitous plot. The issue, as the hero begins to perceive it, goes beyond individual guilt or innocence toward metaphysics. The I unexpected arrival of his father, a retired Irish bartender now suffering from cancer, gives Madden the chance to philosophize out loud: "I think that when something big and unexpected is about to happen, people come out of their daily static.

Their thoughts start pulling toward one another. It's as if an impending event creates a vacuum, and we start to go toward it. Startling coincidences pile up at a crazy rate. It's like a natural phenomenon."

Mailer's tale does not buckle under such heavy luggage, thanks to its firm grounding in realistic detail.

Madden proves a sensitive receptor to the colors of the dying year: "My eye used to find a dance of hues still left here between the field grays and the dove gray, the lilac gray and the smoke gray, the bracken brown and the acorn brown, fox brown and ' Characters are etched with equal care. The police chief, Madden decides, "had the ability of many a big powerful man to stow whole packets of unrest in various parts of his body. He could sit unmoving like a big beast in a chair, but if he had had a tail, it would have been whipping the rungs."

Those who like neat mysteries and tidy solutions may find that Tough Guys Don't Dance tells them more than they want to know. Although Mailer breaks or bends a few of the rules, he also allows the form to focus his considerable but often unruly energies. Ancient Evenings (1983), an attempted epic of long-ago Egypt, was easier for most readers to admire than enjoy. This time out, Mailer is back home where he belongs and writing first of all for fun.

-- By Paul Gray