The Villain as Victim

WELCOME TO XANADU by Nathaniel Benchley. 304 pages. Atheneum. $5.95.

Perhaps the pervasive influence of Freudianism has been felt most perversely in the genre of the thriller. Time was when characters were simply good or bad, threatening or threatened. But nowadays it is difficult to tell a real villain from a societal victim; too often the bewildered reader is caught between a hard shudder of fear and a soft sigh of compassion.

Welcome to Xanadu is a typical new thriller, as was John Fowles's The Collector. The plot is of the old-fashioned boy-terrorizes-girl variety--but with a psychotic twist added. Leonard Hatch, a self-styled poet spouting Nietzsche, comes down out of the New Mexico mountains, kidnaps a tomboyish 16-year-old farm girl and carries her back to his retreat in the hills. Soon, one learns that he is a fugitive from a mental institution, suffering from the endemic new thriller malady: an acute case of mothering so smothering that he is impotent.

The girl, Doris Mae Winter, is a social dropout too ("her formal education had come to an end when she slugged a history teacher for giving her a failing mark") and is frigid to boot. Romance, naturally, blossoms. She becomes Leonard's partner in a Bonnie sexual union--successful for him, enjoyable for her--before he comes to his Clyde end.

Author Benchley, 52, son of Humorist Robert Benchley and himself a successful comic novelist (his book The Off-Islanders became The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming), is a careful tailor of dialogue and characterization. But by laboriously presenting stop-action, caseworker-like descriptions of his characters' psychological past, he unfortunately produces a general air more clinical than criminal, a climax that is more Gestalt than gothic, a final effect that evokes a quiet Oh, yes, instead of a stricken Oh, no!

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