Summer Fiction

MUMBO JUMBO

by ISHMAEL REED

223 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

The travesty of minstrelsy was that a white man in black face could get a laugh cheap because anything black was considered funny. Ishmael Reed (The Free-Lance Pall-Bearers) is a black man in white face who doesn't miss a travesty. Anything white or even tan is ripe for his satire.

Reed's targets have been around at bargain prices for some time, but his laughs are not cheap. The outrageousness of his comic vision and the sinister coils of his prose beg comparison with William Burroughs. Survivors of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance may also be reminded of the orneriness of George Schuyler, the Black Mencken. Mumbo Jumbo is set—or rather cut loose—in the Harlem of the '20s, although Reed's ideas of renaissance slide all the way back to ancient Egypt. Like a street-hustling Norman O. Brown, Reed jives Western civilization into its mythological parts. There is the power of light, reason and uptightness, and the power of darkness, fertility and all those good, dirty down-home things.

In his scatological rereadings of history, Reed comes up with an idea called Neo-HooDooism, a pastiche of an imaginary, ancient African aesthetic and a rip-off from the HooDoo coven of black poets to which Reed belongs. What plot there is to Mumbo Jumbo deals with a search for the ancient, original HooDoo text.

The essential spirit of HooDoo is called Jes Grew. It slips into New Or leans and spreads across the country like a science-fiction plague. It is the jazz in the Jazz Age. Even Warren G. Harding is reported locked in the Lincoln Bedroom listening to The Whole World Is Jazz Crazy. Ranged against Jes Grew are the forces of the Wallflower Order (read those who do not dance).

Reed himself keeps prancing on his drum, preaching the glories of HooDoo culture. It is a welcome alternative to the bludgeoning lectures of LeRoi (Imamu Baraka) Jones. Or is it? The club is a quicker and more merciful weapon than the feather. —R.Z. Sheppard

STAY HUNGRY

by CHARLES GAINES

262 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

Charles Gaines' first novel is one of those rascally, agreeable rarities whose wobbles the reader is willing to indulge all night. Stay Hungry reports with much energy and mild astonishment the adventures of a moneyed Southern loafer, Craig Blake, who falls among body builders. Blake, who is 30 or so, owns half of a real estate agency in Birmingham but cannot be bothered with it.

Instead he wanders from one expensive muscular pursuit to another, shooting rapids and doves, fishing wahoo and tarpon, doing each deed seriously and well with the finest equipment, at precisely the spot in the hemisphere where it is to be done best. No special portent is involved here; one of the novel's considerable virtues is that Blake's frivolous output of ergs is not intended to signify the decline of the West.

He departs from this upper-class play pattern when he stops at the colossal illuminated sign of the Olympic Studio and Spa, featuring Joe Santo, Mr. Alabama. The studio, an upholstered gym, does a good business jiggling lard off businessmen, but Blake has no interest in that. What shakes his unsuspecting soul is the weight room, the preserve of the body builders—grotesque, protein-stuffed Narcissuses, men intent on becoming planets.