Jungle Book

THE COOL WORLD (241 pp.)--Warren Miller--Little, Brown ($3.75).

The skinny, 15-year-old girl is well schooled in human relations (she has been a Harlem prostitute for a year) and chemistry (drinking water, she knows, helps the smoker extract that last bit of nourishment from a reefer). But Lu Ann is a little weak in geography. "Now Man," she says, "you aint gassin me you really got an ocean you can get to on the subway?" Duke Custis, a knife-scarred hard case at 14, knows well enough where the Atlantic is, even has a vague notion that Europe lies somewhere beyond Coney Island. But the boy's world is the three-or-four-street patch of roach-rich jungle ruled by his gang--the Royal Crocadiles, of whom Lu Ann is a one-girl ladies' auxiliary. The few streets beyond are prowled by a rival pack known as the Wolves; the rest of the planet is terra incognita. Duke is a big man in his neighborhood, where people are divided into two classes--the coolies, who are pushed around, and the cool, who do the pushing.

The coolies would really quiver. Duke knows, if he could burn down a few Wolves in the next rumble. But he needs a piece (gun), and the local dealer in hot goods is asking too much bread (cash). Duke is forced to take a job. Says the local marijuana wholesaler: "I look forward to the time when there be men of wisdom in Washington & I can provide my Staff with the Blue Cross & vacations with pay ... Oh if we was legal Lad. If ony we was legal like the other cigarette companies. Every year I'd plow back one percent of the gross inta advertising . . . Girl sittin in a swing--lots of flowers an things aroun her indicating she is accustom to the better things life offers--an under it it say--I smoke Poincianas."

Author Miller has written his jungle book in the form of a long memoir from Duke to the psychiatrist assigned to his case at an upstate reform school. The parallel to J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is ironic, and too close to be anything but intentional. Miller's gift for mimicking the speech of a bitter, neurotic boy is as true as Salinger's. But Holden Caulfield had a caustically individual twist to his mind, and it was on an exploration of this mind that Salinger concentrated. Miller's book is focused not on Duke himself, but on the shockingly brutal existence that is natural to him. The book is too much the composite case history to be a really good novel, but it is powerful reporting and impressive pamphleteering against the savagery of slum life in a great city.

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