A Child of the Times

CONFESSIONS OF A SPENT YOUTH (434 pp.)--Vance Bourjaily--Dial ($4.95).

The confessor-hero of Vance Bourjaily's new novel claims no motive of expiation and none of titillation, uplift or complaint. In his coy title, the author makes the point that his hero's youth was not spent well or ill but merely spent. There is also an arch reference in the hero's name, U. S. D. Quincy, to Thomas De Quincey, the English opium eater. These unfelicitous japes and one other--a minor character is named Central Park Wes--are the book's only ventures into vivid writing. For Author Bourjaily, who has been praised for the lyricism and fantasy of such novels as The End of My Life, The Violated, this is a departure. But the bleak, well-carpentered prose suits the mood of "Quince," now in his late 30s, as he looks backwards.

Quince gives his 17-year-old self no grin of recognition, merely a perfunctory nod, as he introduces the boy. It is a year or so before World War II. Young Quince, after an East Coast childhood that the author all but ignores, talks his way into a copywriting job for a New York ad agency. He works here for a while, attends a New England college for a year or so, quits to enter the ambulance service after war breaks out, joins the infantry after desultory adventures, serves out his time in Japan and returns to the U.S., where he spends several months getting over the war.

The young Quince is reasonably intelligent, fairly likable, passably honest. He has the usual young man's experiences--first sex, first whore, first love; first drink, first drunk; first despicable behavior that cannot be passed off as childishness. And, since this is largely a war novel, there is the first gonococcus and the first death. There is also the first, experimental puff of "Mary Warner" (marijuana). From time to time the exultation of horror or despair of youth will flicker in the memory of the man who recalls him. But the fire does not catch. The older Quince hears the truths, neither trivial nor profound, about war and sex and young manhood. Occasionally he toys with one thoughtfully, but in the end they are all cast away, like a wastebasketful of cigarette wrappers, soup cans or love letters.

Quince keeps silent about his present self, but the confession shows his shape, if not his features. He says early in the book--a good enough novel within its self-imposed limitations--that he has never had the slightest twinge of religious feeling. And it is clear that he has none of the humanist's notion of the glory of man. Nor is he a nihilist. He is merely nihil, nothing, and so perhaps a child of the times.

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