Skits & Schizophrenia

CAPTAIN NEWMAN, M.D. (331 pp.)--Leo Rosten--Harper ($4.95).

H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, the hero of a series of New Yorker stories by Leo Rosten, was a bemused Jewish immigrant who thought the discoverer of the laws of gravity was Isaac Newman.

Now Rosten has published a novel. Its hero is a World War II Air Corps doctor whose name is Newman and, according to one of his peers, "he acts as if it were Newton." Or perhaps just N*E*W*M*A*N. At any rate, he is brilliant, engaging, confident, commanding, twice the size of life, and certainly the most revved-up psychiatrist who ever helped a patient recover from the terrors of the wild blue yonder.

In the background is the southwestern American desert and a training base for fighter pilots and gunners. In the foreground is a section of the base hospital called Ward 7, known to the top brass as Sunnybrook Farm and to its inmates as Psycho Beach. There Captain Josiah J. Newman, M.D., fights his war against "everything from tics to combat fatigue," depending chiefly on his own central intelligence and flak-juice (Pentothal Sodium) as his principal weapons.

Roberts & Nostradamus. The book is actually a collection of related short stories. The best of them are case histories of shattered men, skillfully underwritten but developing clues with all the suspense of detective fiction, moving toward the revelation of a "forgotten" experience. Under Pentothal, a waist-gunner tells Newman how he survived a B-24 crash in North Africa. In the wreckage he stumbled across the other waist-gunner--headless. As he ran from the burning plane he heard the pilot, his buddy, calling him by name for help. The plane then exploded.

Another patient, a ball-turret gunner, was trapped in the turret after his plane was shot up. Several of his bones were broken. Highly flammable oil began to seep into the turret. The boy screamed until the oil reached his lower lip. When the pilot ditched the plane, the ball turret was knocked off, the gunner somehow survived, but his mind was gone. Receiving these cases back in Ward 7, generally knowing little more about them than their names, ranks and serial numbers, Captain Newman approaches them with godly insight, and somehow Rosten manages to suggest with plausibility that his psychiatric hero is three-quarters Mr. Roberts and one-quarter Nostradamus.

Cute Appendicitis. Unfortunately, Rosten alternates his serious chapters with scenes of pure situation comedy, belabored with literary vaudeville. The contrast with the scenes of death and suffering is ludicrous. A story that ends in suicide, for example, is immediately followed by one in which half the officers on the post, full of booze, jump into the officers' club pool in pursuit of a flock of ducks. In another episode, sheep get loose on the main runway when a plane carrying the Under Secretary of War for Air is about to land. There is a private from Alabama who thinks " 'tain't fit for a grown man" to make his own bed, so his sergeant ends up making it for him.

Apparently intending these adornments to offset his central theme and prove that life has at least two sides, Author Rosten has ended up with a novel that suffers from cute appendicitis. Captain Newman, M.D. is really two books, intertwined like medicine's caduceus, at its best considerably better than The Snake Pit, at its worst a fun-house chortle hollowly echoing See Here, Private Hargrove.

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