Hell on Campus

TOO FAR TO WALK by John Hersey. 246 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

Never break the spine of a book, John Fist's father once admonished; it's as wrong as killing a helpless animal. So when Sophomore Fist flopped down in his dormitory room at Sheldon College to do a little studying one night, the first thing he did was snap back the cover boards on Kohler's The Mentality of Apes as far as they would go. What the hell-that was the way he felt. All churned up in his guts, but kinda fuzzy and helpless, too. Like a popgun without a cork. As a freshman, he had been an eager overachiever. Now he was cutting his favorite class because it was just too far to walk. The only thing he really hungered for was a sense of cool. Like his buddy, Chum Breed, a shadowy man who wore elbow patches on brand-new jackets, and pooh-poohed nearly everything. You name it, and old Chum Breed had done it-from sniffing airplane glue at 14 to surfing at La Jolla. Breed even smelled different somehow. Like a faint whiff of short circuits, Lionel trains, old electric fans. In short, like some infernal ozone.

Glorious Wickedness. There is also a faint whiff of post-adolescent Holden Caulfield about John Fist in this ambitious and often amusing novel. Old Pro John Hersey has a deeper purpose than picturing the humiliation of being young, however. Combining the sound reporting skill he employed in A Bell for Adano, and The Wall with the wild imagination he showed in The Marmot Drive and White Lotus, he has tried to explore the collegiate mind, to understand why today's undergraduates are so hard to communicate with, so susceptible to aimlessness, boredom and rebellion.

The exploration vehicle is the Faust theme, which is a pretty striking and typically offbeat Mersey gimmick. Fist (Faust) makes a deal with Chum (Me-phisto), who offers Fist the chance to experience "breakthroughs." All he wants in return is a 26-week option, subject to renewal, on Fist's inmost primeval soul. Oddly enough, when he first steps into the world as the Devil's man, Fist doesn't change much. He starts cutting classes carefreely, naturally. But it is some time before he even gets around to going to a motel with a pretty young high school girl, whose name, of course, is Margaret. Still, what with glorying in their wickedness and trying to impress each other, they finally curl up a good arm's length apart and fall asleep.

Fist makes out much better with Mona, a townie whore with a heart of platinum, and an impressive smattering of all the scholastic disciplines gleaned from faculty clientele. In fact, he likes Mona so much that in one of the most sadly comic episodes in the book, he takes her home and introduces her to his parents. Mom is horrified; Dad is too, but-wow, that sweater!

Nettling Truth. Eventually it begins to dawn on young Fist that, despite his unholy deal, he is as dissatisfied and disorganized as ever. Chum Breed tries to remedy that by feeding him a capsule of LSD. Fist kicks his inhibitions to tatters and even makes a nightmarish descent into Hell. That does it. When he recovers, Fist breaks his contract with the Devil and gladly opts for "the real world, crummy as it is."

Because the truth nettles far more men than it ever sets free, Too Far to Walk is not likely to be received with much enthusiasm on college campuses. Certainly Mersey's pitiless commentary on cant on the campus will miff many people, and both students and faculties will yelp over his satiric swipes at militant protestniks, world changers and plain and assorted knuckleheads. Obviously Hersey has tuned his fine ear to the contemporary campus (he finished the book shortly before his appointment as master of Yale's Pierson College). His very funny student demonstration against majors in the curriculum (ABOLISH THE MAJOR: INTELLECTUAL IRON MAIDEN!) is straight out of today's headlines (TIME, Feb. 25), and his Professor Gutwillig is a marvelously pointed caricature of a preposterously ineffectual intellectual.

As a whole, however, Too Far w Walk earns only a B -as good fiction; the Faustian bit may be clever, but it is too shallow to take seriously. It is Mersey's deft portrayal of the collegiate scene that makes Too Far worth walking for. Parents who have survived the ordeal of pushing a son or two through college will certainly learn a thing or two. Especially if, like Sophomore Fist's father, they have ever had that choked-up feeling in communicating, and have ended up saying hopelessly: "Why don't you get your hair cut?"

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