Books: Nosepicking Contests

The Beat Generation of writing is forget it. Some curly new hair is coming up in Beardsville. The new boys still haven't found a name—The Camp Crowd? The Hallucinogeneration?—but they have brattishly proclaimed their principal preoccupations: LSD, pot, the Spirit of Berkeley, californication, and not fighting in Viet Nam. While there are only a few of them, they have begun to produce a noisy literature that confesses its mongrel origin in the cult of hip, the theater of the absurd, the works of Jack Kerouac, the pop art movement and some of the more deplorable traditions of the college humor magazine.

The masterpiece of the new manner, a book called simply V. (TIME, March 15, 1963), is an epic of planned irrelevance that Joyce would surely have respected. Unhappily, its successors have contributed little more than absurdity to the novel of the absurd. Constructed on the principle of free dissociation, they occasionally come off as hip happenings. More often, as lamentably illustrated in three novels published last week, they simply degenerate into glossolaliac gibberish.

BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME, by Richard Fariña (Random House; 329 pages; $5.95), is a pot-and-peyote boiler about a supercooled campus hippie named Gnossos Pappadopoulis. Written by the brother-in-law of Folk Singer Joan Baez, the book is fashionably half-coherent, a collection of Kerouacky kinks. Gnossos turns on four times a day, calls girls "man," says "dig" a great deal, makes like the Green Hornet with cringing officials at Mentor University, rucksacks triumphantly to Mexico, Las Vegas and Cuba, knows how to hot-wire a car, plays Corelli on his phonograph, and even wins acceptance as an equal by Negro bartenders. Most readers will be more discriminating. Kerouac had a likable knack for making his zaps and zowies add up, against all probability, to a goofy, over-the-wall-and-gone exuberance. Fariña creates nothing more than a pot mood: airless self-satisfaction. He writes like a campus popoff who read a book about Zen but got most of his education from Playboy.