Odd But Human

ALL FALL DOWN (272 pp.)--James Leo Herlihy--Dutton ($3.95).

For some adolescent reason that The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield would have understood, Clint Williams ponders suicide. "Of course, if I end up in some lousy place like Hell," he reflects in his diary, "it would be a miserable mistake. The thing I am gambling on is that after death people become automatically ghosts, and possess thereby complete freedom of movement. ADVANTAGES: I could follow Berry-berry around from place to place."

Both Clint--who decides against becoming a ghost, after all--and his roving older brother, Berry-berry, are members of the Williams family, as splendid a set of oddballs as has appeared in U.S. writing since J. D. Salinger's more eccentric creations. Clinton, who is 14 as the story opens, has just skipped school for 57 consecutive days. He sits around at the Aloha Sweet Shop writing compulsively in his notebooks whatever he sees and hears. This includes his parents' conversations, on which he eavesdrops, and whatever interests him in the family mail that he opens. During the last month he has filled 25 notebooks, excerpts from which make up some of the most revealing as well as some of the novel's very few boring pages.

It is Brother Berry-berry who holds the key to the family's happiness as well as to their despair. Tall, handsome, irresistible to women, brutal and meanly selfish, he bums around the country, calling home only when he needs money. His bemused mother adores him, pathetically unaware that he hates her. His father, a rude, free-thinking eccentric of a kind increasingly rare in the U.S., insists that the boy is only sampling life and will turn out well. When Berry-berry unexpectedly shows up at home, the Williamses have a brief interlude of unaccustomed happiness. He falls in love with a nice girl, and even though he is coolly running a brothel in a nearby town, it seems that he is about to go straight at any moment. The presence of love in the house transforms all the Williamses. Clinton finds almost nothing worth putting into his notebooks, since happiness is so dull, but it affects and even excites him too.

But the rot in Berry-berry runs too deep. When his girl becomes pregnant, he clears out and hits the road again, carelessly denying blame for the tragedy that follows. Yet the short vacation he took from his inner evil created something of value. Having tasted the richness of family love, Clint and his parents are not likely to turn away from it again.

The message of All Fall Down, the universal need for love, is as obvious as it is worthy; the means of getting it across makes unfailingly good reading. Author Herlihy (Blue Denim, The Sleep of Baby Filbertson) plays with a kind of hurt tenderness over every desperate human confrontation. With originality, freshness and economy he can convey the seediness of a brothel, a strip joint, a hotel room--never once trying for the sensational or playing up the shoddy for its own sake. Having skillfully drawn the Williamses as offbeat types, he makes it effectively plain in the end that what makes them important is not their oddness but their kinship to humanity.

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