Shrunken-Head Faulkner

No PLACE TO RUN '(280 pp.)--Philip Alston Stone--Viking ($3.75).

Harvard Freshman Philip Alston Stone, 18, wrote this fictional portrait of a Southern demagogue last year when he was still in prep school (Hotchkiss). No male Sagan, Novelist Stone is a chip off the writing desk occupied by William Faulkner, his famed fellow townsman in Oxford, Miss. In his rhetoric, country humor and nightmare vision of social change and violence. Novelist Stone resembles Faulkner, much as a shrunken head resembles a life-sized one.

The hero of No Place to Run is a kind of composite of the Southern political rabble-rouser with glints of Bilbo and Talmadge, Huey Long and Orval Faubus. Sixtyish, red-gallus-snapping Gene Massie is as loyal as a barracuda, as lecherous as a fruit fly, and as fork-tongued as the serpent who got the first woman's vote from Eve. He bills himself as "the WHITE people's choice" for Governor, and he runs on a platform that has served him ever since he was a two-bit sheriff: "Fightin' the niggers and fightin' th' aristocrats, 'cept you don't have to fool with th' aristocrats no more."

On the hustings 01' Gene is verminous in his tactics, but as raffishly delightful as a hillbilly Jim Curley. He waves his false teeth in the air and slobbers: "Them N-double-A-C-P goons knocked my teeth out." When a heckler asks about $14,000 grafted from a power contract, Massie chuckles, slaps his back pocket and says, "I got it right hyer . . . an' you ain't gon' git a nickel of it neither!"

The ploys and counterploys of the campaign involve some fairly melodramatic goings-on, including an illegitimate childbirth in the street, a scene full of authentic Faulknerian gore. Author Stone is expert at suggesting the blend of revival-meeting urgency, circus gaiety, and kith-and-kin intimacy that flavors rural Southern politics. But the serpentine twists and turns of logic in his novel would tax Laocooen on a good wrestling day. There is a baffling subplot about a priggish schoolteacher and his nymphomaniac wife, who farms out her favors on a faded billiard table. Though the teacher is unnerved by a hint of scandal, he spends most of his time goading his wife into the arms of her lovers. One is Ol' Gene, and by the time the billiard-table girl finishes with him, Massie's in the cold, cold ground.

When it comes to the why rather than the how of his hero-villain, fledgling Novelist Stone is content with a pat childhood trauma. His portrait of a demagogue is colorful but not colorfast: character blurs into caricature, sentiment into soap opera, speech into speeches. But whatever his novel's shortcomings, Author Stone will doubtless enjoy his forthcoming reign as the undergraduate lion of Harvard Yard.

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