Adults Are Barfy

WHERE TKE BOYS ARE (239 pp.)--Glendon Swarthout--Random House ($3.50).

Short of doubled tuition fees, nothing could cause more hooraw among parents of college youth than Author Swarthout's new novel. The book is a comical and exuberantly exaggerated investigation of a subject most parents prefer not to think about: what the children are up to. The specific occasion of misbehavior that has caught Swarthout's attention is a phenomenon as awesome and baffling as the return of the swallows to Capistrano--the swarming of the chug-a-lugs to Fort Lauderdale. Each year during spring vacation, some 20,000 lager-fueled collegians take over the Florida beach town. Few adults knew why they picked Fort Lauderdale until last year, when a TIME reporter asked a coed and got the answer (TIME, April 13) that Swarthout uses for his title: "This is where the boys are." On the Beach. The boys in the novel are stacked three deep around Swarthout's narrator, a girl named Merrit who is stacked almost that deep herself.

She is a freshman from an unidentified state university, where she blunts her 134 IQ on such courses as Core (for "core curriculum") Lang, Core Sci, Core Liv, Basic Bowling, and Advanced Theory and Operation of Appliances. This experience has merely deepened her conviction, shared by the rest of the book's collegians and apparently by 41-year-old Author Swarthout himself, that the adult world is barfy. (Barf is what one does when one gets bulbed on too much beer).

Merrit's prose style runs to campus slang reinforced by girlish underlining. She is frank (also Tom, Dick and Harry) about sex. "If parents think their daughters can attain young womanhood in 1958 in a state of pristinity," she writes, "they are really out to lunch. U.S.A. today stands for Universally Stimulated America." Musing on the beach, she decides that the horizon proves the world really is flat, and burbles, "Gads, think what we could do with edges! Line up the generals and admirals from everywhere and forward march. Inform our congressmen . . . that they are going to be in a parade . . . With no strain we could drop into infinity Greek shipping tycoons . . . Texas oilmen, presidents of state universities . . . football coaches . . . Bing Crosby's boys . . ."

Car-borne Amours. Merrit mocks everything, including beady-eyed readers who think (correctly) that the book's action will be as hot and horizontal as the Fort Lauderdale sand; she includes page references to all the steamy passages. Before vacation is over, Merrit practices Core Liv with a high-souled bass fiddler, a hotshot from Michigan State who is majoring in something called "Communications," and a lad from Brown who, if he were one degree more Ivy, would have buttoned-down ears. Events, including an abortive expedition to aid Castro, soon pass credibility at about 105 miles an hour. But most readers, depending on their ages, will be either too numbed or too amused to protest much.

Novelist Swarthout (They Came to Cor dura) carries off his joke adroitly, but once or twice his middle age shows, notably when he writes about car-borne amours. Back seats have not been necessary for automotive sinning since gearshifts were moved to steering columns.

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