Latter-Day Babbitt

JEFFERSON SELLECK (303 pp.) -- Carl Jonas--Little, Brown ($3).

With his daughter's wedding reception going full tilt, and the expensive pop of champagne corks in his ears, Jefferson Selleck slinks off behind the potted palms to a corner sofa and collapses. Later that day, the family doctor gives his illness a medical name--"coronary occlusion." But Jeff Selleck, a successful Midwestern businessman, has more than heart trouble, he has a troubled heart. Slowed to an invalid's pace, Jeff begins to ask himself some embarrassing questions: "What does it all mean? Who am I? ... Why am I here, and where am I going?"

Back on Gallup. For the remaining months of his life, he grubs for the answers in the memory heap of five decades, and talks his flashback findings into a tape recorder. As Jeff's soliloquy unreels on the pages of Author Carl Jonas' novel (a February Book-of-the-Month Club choice), it unwraps not a man but a mummy. For Jeff Selleck has not sprung from the soil of the creative imagination; he has been raised from the dust of the literary graveyard. He is a latter-day George Babbitt a westernized George Apley, a bewildered Willy Loman, stained with the pathos oJ success. Whenever Sinclair Lewis, John Marquand or Arthur Miller fail him, Author Jonas falls back on George Gallup. Jeff Selleck's life is the stuff life insurance actuary tables are made of.

He lives in a tony suburb of Gateway, a bustling Midwestern city. He is president of a thriving little company called Yaw-Et-Ag (Gateway spelled backwards), which manufactures musical auto horns. In a good year, he makes $20,000 before taxes, but nearly always ends up in the red. After all, one has to keep up with the next-door Ecleses. Jeff never cracks book; culture is his wife's department. He gets his fun shooting deer with a few old cronies from the Chowder & Marching Society. But he sends his boy & girl to Eastern schools to sap up "assurance." His kids baffle Jeff. Why did Tom become a commercial artist instead of coming into the business? Why does Tinker feel Gateway is dreary, her family "common"? Jeff yearns for the simple days of bathtub gin and Coolidge prosperity.

Back to Work. He firmly believes that the election of '32 was a greater catastrophe than the crash of '29. "We put into office as our Chief Executive a Pied Piper ... a gifted madman." If Jeff confuses the state of the nation with the state of his soul, it is because Author Jonas has failed to give him one. Swinging through the jungle of his mind on one rotting cliche after another, Jefferson Selleck finally decides that "courage to keep the whole show running" is the only value he knows much about.

Against his doctor's advice, he goes back to work, and promptly drops dead.

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