Souls for Sale

THE CHILD BUYER (257 pp.)--John Hersey--Knopf ($4).

Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal was that society, to cure starvation, might as well eat children. Novelist John Hersey's equally bitter suggestion is that society, responding to worse and more complex hungers, might just as well buy children. In his first attempt at satire. Hersey can scarcely measure up to Swift; compared to such a model, his passions seem intellectualized. his anger scattered, his cutting edge often blunted by farce. His novel nevertheless is a salutary piece of negative thinking about national vagaries in the matters of education, welfare, legislatures, public morality. It is also a tract against the new barbarians, to whom man is not the immortal soul of the theologians or even the featherless biped of the rationalists but merely a consumer and a statistic.

Forgetting Chamber. As the subtitle explains, the novel is told "in the form of Hearings before the Standing Committee on Education, Welfare & Public Morality of a certain State Senate." The committee --consisting of Senator Voyolko, a moron, Senator Skypack, a Philistine, and Senator Mansfield, a weak man who expends most of his strength keeping his decent impulses in check--meets a week or so after a series of unsettling events in the town of Pequot. where an eccentric gent named Wissey Jones has tried to buy--not borrow or rent--a ten-year-old prodigy named Barry Rudd.

Jones has offered $16,734, a set of airplane luggage, a sports car, some military hairbrushes and various other do-dads, in return for rights to the boy. Barry's father, a machinist, dislikes the fat, sedentary young genius and wants to accept the offer. The boy's mother, who sees in Barry a realization of her unfulfilled yearnings for culture, at first rejects the idea. The committee itself is suspicious until the child buyer explains that national defense is involved. His firm. United Lymphomilloid, needs brains for a nameless 50-year project, and it has developed a process for increasing the IQs of bright children to the unheard-of level of 1,000.

There are drawbacks; the process involves brain laundering, major surgery, and a Forgetting Chamber that is to leave the child with no sensory perceptions and no pre-Lymphomilloid memory. Chairman Mansfield remarks that this seems a little drastic. But he is only briefly troubled, and the hearings continue.

Junior Faust. As teachers and school officials are questioned about Barry, Author Hersey digs slyly at educational cant. One salaried fool explains that the boy is regarded as one of the "extreme deviates at the upper end of the bell curve"--an "exceptional" child, to use the comforting euphemism also applied to the spastic, the mentally retarded and the clubfooted. Someone inquires whether it is really true that the gifted and the clubfooted are placed in the same category. "They are exceptional, yes. Lord Byron, as I remember, was both--but then, we don't run across many Byrons in this state, do we?"

One by one, the adults who control Barry's life are subverted by the child buyer. But Barry himself for three days holds the senators and child buyer at bay, and it is hard to remember that he is still a small boy, tied to his mother. When he loses her support, he has no further reason to resist. The promise of even keener intelligence at last buys the child, like a sort of junior Faust. Barry's curtain speech is memorable and moving: "I was wondering about the Forgetting Chamber. If all the pictures went out, if I forgot everything, where would they go? Just out into the air? Into the sky? Back home, around my bed, where my dreams stay?"

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