It Only Seems Like Fun

THE WEEKENDERS by Max Gunther. 237 pages. Lippincott. $4.95.

Dark suspicions arise that the current oversupply of books proving that Everything Is Hollow (or: A Searching Look at the Cardboard Values of Our Aspirin Society) is part of a plot by the sunshine merchants. When everyone is sufficiently depressed, publishers of inspirational texts will find a renewed market for books disproving hollowness on the ground that Everything Is Stuffed with Meaning. Meanwhile, in the hollow or waning-moon part of the cycle, we have had The Waste Makers, The Pyramid Climbers, The Brain Pickers, The Naked Society, and that inevitable-but-yet-unwritten examination of the lunch habits of advertising men, Breath in the Afternoon. Now, with no moon in sight, the co-author of The Split-Level Trap has written The Weekenders.

Reason Why. Weekenders, it turns out, are people who work five days a week, with two days off for getting into sociologically fascinating trouble. That is, weekenders are almost everyone not in jail. Most weekenders, Author Gunther reports, embrace the Fun Mystique. The weekender's "selfesteem depends on his success in having, or at least demonstrating, fun. The weekender likes to be thought of as an extrovert who lives in a loud fast whirl of activities. Anything less is felt to be almost if not quite pathological . . . Dr. James A. Wylie of Boston University has studied family recreation and found that the typical family has 20 or 30 different activities to keep it busy on weekends. Some have as many as 70."

Here Author Gunther, with borrowed research, shows mastery of an important technique of the searching-look book--the compounding of statistics from air and egg white. What counts as an "activity"? Brushing your teeth? Mowing the lawn with a toy gasoline tractor? If five members of one of Dr. Wylie's families watch Gunsmoke, does the researcher chalk up five activities? This is an important element in the art of making the world sound hollow when it is thumped. Another is the unvarying assumption that no one ever does anything because he likes it. If he goes skiing, it is to show off his wounds; if he gives a party, it is to prove something to his friends; if he goes bunburying with his secretary, it is to improve his self-image, not because he likes the bells on her toes.

Troweled Guilt. Naturally a citizen cannot escape being proved a fraud by spending his weekends working instead of fun having. The business man who keeps Saturday office hours does not do it to catch up on his work, nor to impress his boss; he is hiding from failure as a fun haver. The weekend gardener trowels guilt into the soil; the Sunday painter paints his soul off-white.

Since there is almost no human activity that cannot be accomplished, attempted, contemplated, or escaped from on a weekend, Gunther has a lot to cover. Or to look at it another way, he has endless opportunities to quote from other Hollow Worlders whose subjects are more specialized. His book is, in fact, an anthology of the maxims of Russell Lynes, David Riesman, Helen Gurley Brown, Vance Packard, Betty Friedan and William H. Whyte Jr.

But Gunther is a published magazine writer ("When to Worry About an Office Romance"--Good Housekeeping, March 1961) and does not really need help. Writing of weekend sin (overrated, but still deplorable), he refuses to panic, observing that "it is not the long stretch of workless time itself that most often causes sin but the attitudes of people toward the weekend and the needs and dreams they bring to it from the work week."

Here the reader suspects that Gunther's book itself may be the transition between the Hollow World books and the Stuffed with Meaning kind. In a summing up that is almost a haiku, he elevates the spirit: "The weekend is like a big red apple. Some would eat it too fast and get indigestion. But it is still a lovely apple."

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