Books: Son of Vipers

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THE MAGIC ANIMAL by Philip Wylie. 358 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

It may give today's young protesters pause to discover that way back in 1943 this chap Wylie was throwing verbal Molotov cocktails at authority, the church, motherhood, scientists and economists. His book Generation of Vipers, written in a mood of "ribaldry and rage," became a famous bestseller. True, it did not inspire street riots or start campus revolutions, but at least it gave aid and comfort to thousands of as yet un-Freudianized young men and women who wanted to reject their mothers.

Today, at 65, Wylie has lost none of his rage but all of his sense of ribaldry and humor—which puts today's youth one up on him. This tirade is directed again at humanity in general. Specifically, Wylie's complaint is that man does not live as the animal he was in tended to be; instead he has buried his natural instinct under phony shibboleths such as religion, capitalism, Communism, belief in progress and blind faith in science.

Wylie directs his fire at many ills deserving censure: slums, greed, ignorance, spreading violence and assorted immoralities. What Wylie wants, in his calmer moments, is fair enough: more regard for ecology, less plundering of natural resources, higher ethical standards all the way from suburbia to government. He may even be right when he says that modern man is "surely crazier than we realize." But he undercuts his own arguments by his hysterically hectoring tone. Christians, he writes, "made all the world a hell." He testifies he has seen scientists at work who are "corrupt, mindless, ignorant." In the end, his book induces only the normal long-sermon doze and the final dogged agreement that, yes, we're not as good as we should be.