Books: Prince Valium

THE SOUTH FLORIDA BOOK OF THE DEAD by Robert Merkin Morrow; 299 pages; $15.50 (hardback) $7.95 (paper)

The cast of this acute, disturbing first novel inhabits the Florida of all-night bowling alleys, Cuban diners and lesbian discos, caroming from the back streets of Key West to the tile-roofed mansions of Miami. There is no one to root for in The South Florida Book of the Dead—except the author—but its Me-generation drug pushers are an indelible crew, acting out new therapies while measuring their "interpersonal relationships" in grams.

David Becker, preppie and Viet Nam vet, sees himself as Prince Valium. Becker nobly advises a neophyte buyer to get out of town and stay out. Then he admits, "It certainly was about as close as coke dealers could ever come to walking old ladies across busy intersections."

Becker's pals are equally seedy and greedy. Lee, an unstable banker, knows how to move chunks of funds without a trace. He warns Becker: "I'm fingering you. You're going to the gas chambers with the rest of the sheenies." Annie, a bisexual, swings one way with her .22 pistol, feared by criminals and customers; Michael, the "Fearless Faggot," smokes joints to cover the aroma of gun oil. Only Richard, the electronics wizard, can compute the risks and consequences of a world where dealers and customers, police and victims, live outside the law.

Merkin's characters are old only in street wisdom, and they are eventually undone by the one informer they cannot silence: immaturity. Richard leaves the gang for his parents' Connecticut suburb, "until a semester starts somewhere." The violent adventures of the others have the aura of a dorm game of Dungeons and Dragons, and Becker's final question smacks of Psych. 101: "Did people have to get blown away just so I wouldn't have to. . . wear neckties?"

Merkin, a former Miami News reporter, knows his turf and his people painfully well. He also knows more than enough about motivation, plot and prose. But his main virtue is an understanding of how a generation degenerates. When the youthquake started, students read Huxley's hymn to hallucinogens, Doors of Perception, for enlightenment. Merkin's delayed adolescents appear at those doors ready to shoot off the locks. —By J.D. Reed