Books: Summer Fiction

(2 of 3)

Most of the builders, as Blake is warned, are rough as cobs. But Joe Santo, whose lats and traps are so spectacular that he is a cinch to become Mr. Southeast, is another matter. He is not only an athlete of mythic skill but a knockabout saint whose sort last surfaced in the works of Kerouac and Kesey. In short, he is good, clean wish fulfillment, and author and hero fall in love with him, in the manner of small boys. Santo does an impromptu star turn at a rodeo, befriends and soothes some strung-out hippies, and finally hands over his golden girl friend to Blake.

What is very good in the novel is Blake's undeluded but cheerful acceptance of people and things that he knows are both second-rate and a bit flaky. Body building is both, but Blake is curious, and what the hell, largeness is all. Charles Gaines, who is able to write about muscular matters without sounding as if he were arm wrestling with Hemingway's ghost, is as fascinated by the body builders as his hero Blake is, and he gives their posing contests a kind of loopy dignity.—John Skow

STRANGE PEACHES

by EDWIN SHRAKE

375 pages. Harper's Magazine Press.

$7.95.

Still shy of 30, the hero of this Gatling-gun novel has been a reporter, an on-camera TV newsman and an actor whose best-known performances were as Tarzan and a cowpoke on a foolish series called Six Guns Across Texas. John Lee Wallace, fed up with Hollywood, returns home to Dallas, leaving a vapor trail of dope and alcohol. He and his best buddy Buster plan to make "one good, true, fair thing"—a documentary film about the real Texas. The time is the late summer of 1963.

As John Lee shoots his footage, Author Shrake captures superbly the feeling of combustible chaos that climaxed in the Kennedy assassination. Senile billionaires, rabid right-wing executives of shadow corporations, cheap crooks, displaced cowboys, and kids who stay well stoned and let it all float right on by, even Jack Ruby—Shrake molds them all into his amphetamine apocalypse.

He also manages shrewdly to show how fitting it was that the dream of the last decade should have ended in Dallas. John Lee Wallace, his spirit restless, his head forever fogged in, makes an appropriate guide for this descent into hell. But Author Shrake, who has kept his distance from John Lee throughout most of the book, ends by indulging in a little unnecessary hero worship. After Nov. 22, the story shifts to Acapulco, where John Lee and his girl get mixed up in a gunrunning, dope-smuggling scheme that is crazily uncoordinated with the Texas part of the book. The nightmare dwindles down to a good-old boy's yarn that got out of hand, and a novel that first threatens to explode fizzles out like a firecracker tossed into a puddle.—Jay Cocks

ACTION

by JAMES GUETTI 280 pages.

Dial Press. $6.95.

Theoretically, gambling ought to be an interesting obsession. In this engaging first novel James Guetti is not always certain just what the obsession is: an untrammeled subculture with openings to the metaphysical or merely a shabby compulsion that can absorb the addict to the point of rendering every thing else in his life irrelevant. Yet it is precisely that ambivalence that makes his book interesting.