Button Up Your Overcope

BARNETT FRUMMER IS AN UNBLOOMED FLOWER by Calvin Trillin. 98 pages. Viking. $4.50.

Consider Barnett Frummer. He is a radical for love's sake who finds himself stuck to the hot asphalt pavement after going limp while protesting housing discrimination. He is the hapless yearner for un-chic Rosalie Mondle, who might one day paint "Get Out of Vietnam" across his chest. He is the groping incipient gourmet (trying to out-cook his friends) who dreams that he is accused of eating Fritos. He is the poor chap who cannot get invited to those with-it parties Rosalie attends, "where whites gathered to be castigated by some prominent Negro." Says Barnett: "I can't understand it. I don't like to blow my own horn, but I do think I'm as guilty as anybody." As the anti-anti-anti-hero of Calvin Trillin's collection of short, softly hilarious, episodic New Yorkerish misadventures, Barnett jousts for Rosalie's attention in the culture jungle of the great city, raising a series of rumpled expectations all doomed to failure.

Can Barnett destroy a protest movement by leading a "floatin" in front of a Liberian freighter carrying grain for Royalists in Yemen? Impossible. Will Barnett make a mockery of the Camp aesthetic and win the ice-cold heart of Rosalie by memorizing all the shows of the Ted Mack Original Amateur Hour! Improbable. Might Barnett expiate 400 years of white guilt by joining "a group of young white businessmen who had gathered together to back a Negro clothes designer and a Harlem dress store in a new line of maternity clothes called 'Mother Jumpers'?" Unconscionable. Could Barnett win Rosalie's attention by mastering "overcope," the technique of avoiding the frustrations of the big city by combining gall and guile? Indubitably not.

Ages from now, cultivated men will no doubt read Trillin to know the tongue and cheek of coffeehouse New York, much as we read Addison and Steele to know the preoccupations of coffeehouse London. Meanwhile, on Barnett, on! Overcope and Frummer us to death.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.