Did He?

DEATH KIT by Susan Sonfag. 311 pages. Farrar, Sfraus & Giroux. $5.75.

Sultry Susan Sontag, 34, is a lady literary light who turned on four years ago with a flood of essays--on Levi-Strauss and Camus, on blue movies and happenings. They showed a clear, candid mind, especially quick at spotting new trends. Her 1964 essay, "Notes on 'Camp,' " is a minor classic, a sharp, entertaining catalogue that did much to popularize--and overpopularize--the Ins and Outs of the camp phenomenon. Her one novel in those days was The Benefactor (TIME, Sept. 13, 1963), an opaque tale about a dandified dreamer who cannot figure out whether he killed his wife in a nightmare or in cold blood. Death Kit is much the same. The hero is a junior executive named Diddy, and the question is, Did he, while traveling on a train, butcher an innocent railroad workman? Diddy is sure he did it; yet a blind girl near by who hears all and who proves to be on target about everything else, says he never left his seat. But most of the time Diddy's deed seems the least of the author's concerns, for she is too busy with other things: writing the kind of "modernistic" conundrum that was fashionable in the '20s, folding in essays on alienation and editorials on Viet Nam.

Death Kit unfortunately contains the blunted instruments of the avant-garde movement and Freudian criticism. The novel is studded with little messages to critics and longhairs that Something Is Going On: the word now usually appears in parentheses; passages of various sorts are indented; there are interruptions for long Dos Passos-like lists that, unlike her enumerations of the artifacts of camp, don't add up. Worst of all, there are dreams--long, logical un-dreamlike dreams that exhaust the read er even faster than they do Diddy. Yet for all its flights, most of the writing is conventional dialogue and ordinary continuity, with a few set-piece scenes that feebly attempt Nabokovian wit.

The reader, though he may never decide whether or not Diddy left his seat, knows right off what his problem is: alienation. "Diddy merely inhabits his life," the author says. "One can redeem skeletons and abandoned cities as human. But not a lost, dehumanized nature." God knows Diddy tries. He falls in love with the blind girl, marries her in an attempt to help them both.

Unquestionably, Susan Sontag tries too. The novel is arduously worked out, with the author always at the reader's elbow, adding explanations ("to a man wielding a microscope, his own seeing eyes are blind"), pointing out high spots, summing up. The only thing she could do (now) to help the book would be to write one of her well-reasoned essays to explain why she wrote it.

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