Books: Joyriding

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THE CAR THIEF

by THEODORE WEESNER

370 pages. Random House. $6.95.

Alex Housman steals cars. At 16, already in trouble because he has rifled high school gym lockers and lifted a wad of bills from the wallets there, he is off in a coppertone Buick Riviera —his 14th car—"joyriding" with a tense joylessness through his slushy Michigan factory town, watching for cops, indulging his quick-fade fantasies of ownership and manhood.

He is caught. With a cavalier imprudence he has given the camel's hair coat in the back seat to a girl he hardly knows, and the girl's mother calls the police. He goes to a youth detention house, does a few months' time, then returns to Central High School, where he is brutally beaten by his schoolmates for that locker-room job. He drops out of school, drifts, eventually joins the Army.

It is, in outline, an unprepossessing story—a punk's progress. In this first novel, Theodore Weesner's tones are flat, sometimes excessively precise. Yet the book develops a building power. It is, for one thing, an achievement of almost perfect sympathy. One begins caring about Alex—his guilt, his daydreams, his bewildered adolescent innocence. Descendants of Huckleberry Finn, Alex and his brother do cannonball dives into the polluted muck of an urban river, cracking exuberant and forlorn scatological jokes about what they are swimming in.

In Alex's swift fantasies of being a basketball star, in his coach's small complacent cruelties that drive Alex to quit, an American dream of winning goes winkling out. The thoroughfares of escape—rivers, highways—are encrusted, blocked arteries on the landscape.

Alex's father, alcoholic, grimy with grease, possesses only a vocabulary of manly cliches. The father works in the local Chevrolet plant, making the bright cars that his son will steal. Yet between him and his boy, Weesner draws an evasive tenderness, a shared vulnerability and hence a curious kind of dignity.

For Alex, the cars sometimes offer a disjointed sense of romance, but mainly they are an obsession, a brief freedom and, simultaneously, a vehicle for the half wish of getting caught. Only the cars seem to renew themselves, with new models every year.