Among the Abs & Pects

MUSCLE BEACH (236 pp.)--Ira Wallach--Little, Brown ($3.50).

A boggle is, among other things, the gurgle made by quicksand as it closes over its victim. Such febrile considerations flash through the boggled minds of readers as they sink out of sight in Author Wallach's pun-swampy prose. The man is popping with word-foolery. He interrupts his narrative--and a more interruptible narrative would be hard to find--to inform the reader that a tirade is "a sneak attack on a haberdashery," and a syndrome is "a large amphitheater where the ancient Romans used to sin." He dreams moodily of going to Canada and establishing a police force equal in every respect to the Mounties. "I would call them the Royal Canadian Tanta-mounties," writes Wallach, adding with crocodile contrition: "Thoughts like this are basically sterile."

They are, and it is just as well, If the little monsters were to breed, perhaps with the four-headed puns of Peter (The Tunnel of Love) De Vries, the printed word might never be the same. Still, considering the general run of summer fiction, Wallach's fable is funny enough. He tells of a soulful young swimming-pool salesman who leaves Manhattan because "inside stuffy little apartments a million parakeets mess up their cages and refuse to say an intelligent word"--a conception subtle with the flavor of Zen-Zen, the West Coast's cultural mouthwash. In California, the hero sells pools frantically, working toward that aqueous millennium when "canoe trips from San Francisco to Tia Juana would be feasible, all by swimming pool and with no portage more than thirty yards."

The pool peddler is happy until he chances upon Muscle Beach, a Pacific sand pile on which barbell brontosauri lovingly cultivate their abs (abdominal beef), glutes (backsides) and pects (chest muscles). There he spies the girl of his dreams--but alas, she loves a weight lifter. Can the underpected salesman sunder this pair? Sure he can, if he will only assert his baritoned intelligence against the rival falsetto. A falsetto, of course, is--in the definition of Poet-Punster Mark Van Doren--a guy with a false set o' values.

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