New Pleasures and Promises

By Stefan Kanfer

THE GOD OF MIRRORS

by Robert Reilly

Atlantic Monthly Press

403 pages; $17.95

He was called an "arch-artist" by George Bernard Shaw and "that sovereign of insufferables" by Ambrose Bierce. In The God of Mirrors, Oscar Wilde qualifies for both titles, reducing every crisis to an epigram. Some of them are prophetic. In Dorian Gray, "the bad will suffer. The good will be rewarded. That . . . is what fiction means." Some are merely contrary: "It is always an advantage not to have received a good education." As Wilde arcs over London, he decides that the difference between true love and caprice is that caprice lasts a little longer, and that is his undoing. His infatuation with the unstable "Bosie," son of the Marquess of Queensberry, lands him in court and then in jail, his marriage broken, his reputation ruined. This is the stuff of tragedy, but Wilde will not have it so; the imp of the perverse follows him to the grave. Exiled to Paris, the extravagant drunk regrets that he is dying "the way I lived: beyond my means."

Throughout, Reilly maintains the properly ironic tone. There is no special pleading about British homophobia; Wilde is a collaborator in his own misfortune. Shaw, Max Beerbohm, Frank Harris and the Edwardian elite are given delightful cameo roles, and the prose has the appropriate drawing-room astringency: Shaw and Wilde might have been close friends "if they only had less in common." If this is a novel with an excess of surface, that was, after all, its subject's salient feature. The important part, as Wilde would insist, is that the thing glitter. And so it does.

THE CHRONICLES OF DOODAH

by George Lee Walker

Houghton Mifflin; 246 pages; $16.95

This is a novel written in blood and Inc. The author has been a speechwriter for Lee Iacocca, Gerald Ford and the chairman of the board of American Motors, and he has manifestly spent many hours with Kafka's In the Penal Colony and Orwell's dystopian visions. Walker's central figure, a nameless public relations man for a major corporation, is getting stale. The company packs him off for behavioral conditioning. Walker is not much on acronyms: the victim is made to undergo PAR--Positive Attitudinal Reinforcement--and SAD--Supervisory Aptitude Development. But the forced seminars ring with comic truths: the victim is considered a pariah because of his indifference to football and "masculine science," i.e., driveway resurfacing. He has yet to master doodah, the company version of gobbledygook, and he is too easily seducible by beautiful employees. Under the ministrations of expert torturers, he learns to babble meaninglessly about sports and domestic trivia, conquers the undesirable speech defects of Humblepause and Gropesounds and refuses to submit to uncorporate diversions like recreational sex. But mere electric shocks, drills and whippings are not the end of his training. As the humor turns from the disparaging to the sinister, he is given a final loyalty test: he must kill his co-worker and confidant. Will he rebel? Or has his brain, like Winston's in Nineteen Eighty-Four, been washed and blow-dried? Suffice to say that only a computer could find the ending happy. Along the terror-ridden corridors of power, Walker, 57, offers an unusual amalgam of merriment and rage. His voice is occasionally too strident, possibly the result of many years of Humblepause. But he is worth hearing for his mirth, and for his message.

KABUL by M.E. Hirsh

Atheneum

445 pages; $19.95

Omar Anwari is Cabinet minister to the last Afghan King, who was deposed in 1973. The three Anwari children are refractions of Omar's bitterness and fanatical loyalty. Mangal, a journalist, becomes a revolutionary. Saira, at once the most sophisticated and confused, shuttles uneasily between her own nation and the U.S., where she has been a Radcliffe student. Tor, the youngest, is a volatile, seething youth who receives his education in Moscow. This sibling rivalry is no mere mix in the Freudian crucible. Saira takes a Russian lover, Mangal is a lethal conniver, Tor is a black marketeer. Each child has a capacity for nobility--and for disillusion and betrayal. Boston- based M.E. Hirsh, 38, tends to be a bit long-winded: Kabul's 445 pages could have been trimmed. Still, this is an instance of that rare genre, the moral thriller whose personae are vigorous enough to cut through any amount of excess narrative.

SUMMER by Lisa Grunwald

Knopf; 212 pages; $15.95

The appeal of an island is older than prose. It is a universal symbol, as valid for the isolated state as for the besieged heart. In this lean, piercing novel, Lisa Grunwald renews the metaphor by making Sanders Island, off Cape Cod, Mass., a garden and a desert. The narrator, Jennifer Burke, is the younger daughter of what seems an ideal couple: Milo and Lulu Burke are so devoted that they have always refused to fly in separate planes because "they wouldn't have wanted to go on without each other."

But from this summer onward, Milo, a vastly successful sculptor, will have to take off alone: Lulu is dying of inoperable cancer. Yet of the four members of the immediate family, she seems the least affected. Under the relentlessly cheerful sun, Jennifer and her sister Hillary bicker with each other, flirt with young men and fend off the questions of concerned friends. Milo disappears into his work. Only Lulu perseveres as if nothing untoward were happening, presiding at parties and amiably chatting with celebrities. "She would not act like a dying woman," Jennifer resentfully observes, "would not grant us the haven of feeling sympathy and outrage and pity and sorrow." Like many new novelists, Grunwald tends to oversymbolize a first affair (this one concerns a romantic flying instructor), and the consolations of art and life are a bit too neatly programmed. But on the journey to maturity, she displays a knowing eye for the arrangements of society and color in a place where "the summer residents were tan, the weekenders were sunburned, and the islanders were pale," and she is wholly immune to the first novelist's affliction of elaboration and repetition.

Whether the author, who is 26, can sustain her intensity and self-discipline remains to be read. For now, she has found an intonation and an idiom entirely her own, and if her novel brims with pain, it also fulfills Francis Bacon's famous and difficult demand that ideally the "heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them."

KRIPPENDORF'S TRIBE

by Frank Parkin

Atheneum

192 pages; $13.95

To the dictionary, civilization is social organization of a high order. To Frank Parkin, it is a coat of paint that washes off in a storm. In this case, the storm is the current decay of England, with its attendant riots and strikes. Unemployed Anthropologist James Krippendorf finds himself in charge of three children when his wife, a TV journalist, goes off to cover foreign affairs. He has received a grant to do fieldwork in the Amazon jungle, but so far he has not set foot out of London, and the money is almost gone. Suddenly he is possessed by a brilliant notion: Why not take notes on his children, Shelley, Mickey and Edmund, and present them as observations about the rites and rituals of a distant tribe called the Shelmikedmu? The victim of role reversal notes that "in Shelmikedmu eyes . . . the only truly complete human being is one who sweeps in the morning, scrubs in the afternoon and cooks in the evening." After staring obsessively at a young woman's cheesecloth shirt, he writes, "Well-endowed girls are . . . often to be seen strutting and posturing around the village . . . and a man always shows such women great respect, ever fearful of having a malevolent nipple pointed in his direction." His notes grow more detailed as his brood regresses, napalming the neighbor's cat, filing their teeth and, finally, living in a tree house in the backyard. Which has deteriorated more, the racially torn, economically battered society outside, or the wild-eyed members of the Krippendorf tribe?

Parkin, 45, the author of four books on political science, including Middle Class Radicalism, knows whereof he piques. His is an ingenious performance, mad in every sense of the word. At the finale, Krippendorf is headed for the jungle, and funny as he is, good riddance to him. It is Parkin who deserves an encore.

DE MOJO BLUES by A.R. Flowers

Dutton; 217 pages; $16.95

Tucept HighJohn is a now-familiar figure: the black Viet Nam veteran with a scorched past and a stalled future. But A.R. Flowers gives his protagonist a new component: the ex-grunt has a voracious curiosity about the healing powers of the occult. Together with two of his buddies, HighJohn has been dishonorably discharged for a fragging incident. After years of wandering, he seeks to clear his name and reclaim his identity. Clutching an amulet given to % him by a buddy killed in action, he seeks out a Memphis hoodoo man. In an isolated house, he undergoes a series of strange quasi-African rituals that unearth long-buried memories of war and childhood, triumph and disgrace. Flowers, 35, produces a dreamy, arhythmic prose that edges close to jazz, disdaining quotation marks, breaking into sudden flashbacks and ritualistic yowls. Those interested in social and psychological attitudes would be better advised to consult Bloods (1984), a brilliant nonfiction account of black soldiers edging into civilian life. De Mojo Blues is inexact and frequently overemotional, an impression, not a blueprint. But, at its best, it is a convincing account of redemption and a true original.

WALES' WORK by Robert Walshe

Ticknor & Fields; 277 pages; $16.95

Publisher Wallace Marshall Wales is found dead. Robert Racine, his long- suffering editor, sits alone with the deceased. Abruptly, the corpse rises and leaves the mortuary before the shocked editor can recover his senses. Wales is now legally dead, and Racine is not only his mourner, he is the publisher's official biographer. Mysterious notes start to arrive, and the editor begins his assignment, only to find that every lead is labyrinthine, put there principally so that Robert Walshe, 59, can drop the names of impossible books, lampoon book publicity and try on Woody Allen's foolscap in an argument for reprinting the Bible: "Yaweh, the most terrible and inscrutable . . . Think of having a god like that for a friend. Imagine having his author on your publishing list."

All this is abetted and hindered by experiments in type, long lists of skyscraper measurements and Japanese names, drawings and surreal parodies of characters as disparate as Swift, Dylan Thomas and Will Rogers. Wales' Work subscribes to its belief that "sanity . . . is the ability to subscribe to other people's illusions." When those other people are writers, the subscription soon runs out, and after that, pandemonium reigns supreme. There has been no performance quite like this since the last Anthology of Humor, and if this mockingbird has yet to find his own song, he can cackle and screech with the best of the flock.