Books: Also Current: Jul. 24, 1964

ON ICE by Jack Gelber. 311 pages. Macmillan. $4.95.

Jack Gelber's first play, The Connection, was set half a league to hellward of the boundary where bohemianism shades into crime and insanity. Its heroes were heroin addicts, its dialogue had the tape-recorder hiss of genuine desperation, and the result was a 32-month run off-Broadway. Gelber's first novel seemingly starts off to make that same scene. Marijuana smoke curls up from the pages; the characters are mostly Greenwich Village idiots. But though the chief idiot, Manny Fells, has lowered himself by his own bootstraps into...