Improving on Oedipus

WELCOME TO THEBES (372 pp.)--Glendon Swarthout--Random House ($5.95).

The author of Where the Boys Are, a bestselling novel about collegians on vacation, has now taken a giant step into Greek tragedy. He should have stayed with the boys in Fort Lauderdale. Greek grandeur is not duplicated by a setting in Thebes (Mich.) or Greek name-dropping. Swarthout reads like a parody of a bad translation of Homer: "At last the leaves are fallen; then do men their duty to the tree-crop, rite singular to towns, to which only fathers and sons may be initiate: leaf burning . . . Wives and mothers watch, doing dishes, their heads and shoulders oracular in kitchen light."

Into these gentle leaves tramps the hero, Sewell Smith, home from writing a bestselling novel and determined to take revenge on the town elders who long ago did in his daddy. What luck! All the elders have slept with the town's 14-year-old nymphomaniac. Smith plots to blackmail them on a statutory rape charge, and the novel is soon awash with sex and violence. The ancient Greeks knew the value of restraint; Oedipus' crime was the more horrible because it was the only one in the play. Swarthout produces so many horrors he satiates the reader. Nobody will be fooled by pseudo-Greek trappings. "This body was as stately," writes Swarthout, preparing for a seduction scene, "as classic in its shaft of rib and hip and thigh as a column of Ionic order, the lavish capitals of the breasts as perfect, the belly ornate as the enfabled girdle called Cestus."

Innumerable seductions and suicides later, Sewell burns to death, and good old Thebes (Mich.) is saved. A blind newspaper editor pronounces an un-Grecian moral: "With mortals, as with cards, play the percentages; you may draw successfully to a straight of vice, but more frequently a full house of virtue will take the pot."

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