A Diamond in the Fluff

By R. Z. Sheppard

WILLY REMEMBERS by Irvin Faust. 249 pages. Arbor House. $6.95.

Anyone who has read Irvin Faust's short stories and novels knows how this former high school guidance counselor tenderizes human defect and deficiency. Faust's best characters, the Puerto Rican janitor in Roar Lion Roar, the questing professor in The Steagle, the transistor-radio addict in Philco Baby, are consumed by a world of mass-produced trivia and popular mythology.

They generate authentic obsessions about the inauthentic.

The things that go through the head of Willy T. Kleinhans, a 93-year-old Spanish-American War veteran, are typically Faustian. From the limbo of an old soldiers' home, Willy recalls a confusion of dates, events, cultural artifacts and personal history. It is as if the roll of film in a home movie had been doubly and triply exposed. Willy is not un like an Uncle Sam suffering from advanced arterial sclerosis -- a symbol of a nation that sometimes seems to have gone from a vigorous, righteous innocence to a befuddled old age in less than 100 years.

What Willy remembers is loosely bracketed in time by Teddy Roosevelt's "Bully!" and the Viet Nam War protesters' "Hell, no, we won't go!"

It is a change that is gentled by an overwhelming nostalgia for the Spanish-American War. When he is not talking about his wife Helga, his successful milk business, or how he spent Dec. 7, 1941, arranging an abortion for his son's girl friend, he keeps drifting back to the days when he and his "bunkies" whipped the "Dago" in Cuba. But not before he overcame his cowardice in a rib ald send-up of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. It is a ripe ad dition to the sanitized exuberance dished out by T.R. in The Rough Riders.

World War II was more remote and not as much fun. Willy's eldest son was killed in it. The strudel of his father's eye, he was a lad with an infallible business instinct for knowing just when to switch from regular to homogenized milk. By contrast, the surviving son, Frank Joseph Kleinhans, is an inept dreamer who goes through life keeping his amateur standing.

Frank lives for pole vaulting. He holds a B.S. in the sport from Regensburg (Ohio) College, having just passed with a leap of 10 ft. His ambition in life is to clear the bar at 12 ft. After World War II, during which he managed 10 ft. 6 in. outside a castle in Germany, Frank becomes a balding fixture at all the local meets back home. Competing with a bamboo pole years after everyone else has switched to fiber glass, he achieves his goal at age 45. But the pole snaps and Frank is skewered to death on its splinters.

Author Faust has always been a fast man with an Apocalypse. But here he is so fast and gratuitous that it seems as if he had loosed havoc upon his creations in order to cover up the compassion and sentiment that went into their making. On a purely technical level, F.J.K.'s sudden gory end solves an other problem: ending a fine short story that threatens to outshine an amusing but amorphous novel.

R.I. Sheppard

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