Subway Syndrome

THE CASE HISTORY OF COMRADE V. by JAMES PARK SLOAN 148 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $4.95.

In the middle of his brilliant and enigmatic second novel, James Park Sloan invents the "subway syndrome." Its victims are those overeducated drunks encountered in the subways late at night, frantically spitting out manic monologues at the tile walls. Ex-lawyers, ex-teachers, even ex-psychiatrists (who knows?), these gray-stubbled ruins with burning eyes represent, Sloan suggests, "the human psyche driven underground ... by a sense of helplessness in the face of an overwhelming body of human knowledge, subtly divided and incomprehensible to any single man." They don't know--they can't know--The Answer, and that knowledge is killing them.

Sloan, 27, has taken on an anti-hero so refined he is practically a mathematical abstract. The author has broken down this problem solver into a human being by confronting him with problems the higher math cannot solve.

In the beginning Comrade V. is a case of the scientist as monstrous prig. When he played goalie on his school soccer team, young V. effortlessly blocked shots as exercises in trigonometry. At his father's funeral he coolly analyzed the seating patterns of mourners as a bimodal distribution. After he married, he computed the time his wife and children were subtracting from his fruitful professional computing--and promptly abandoned them.

Such efficiency soon made V. the premier mathematician in the County of L He occupied a prestigious university chair. Research foundations competed to give him grants. He was appointed consultant to the National Bureau of Statistical Analysis. What more could a figure-freak want?

Then V. made an inaccurate projection of the barley harvest, or anyway he was accused of an inaccurate projection. Before anyone could say E = mc2, he was detained in a white, windowless room in the oddest sort of building ("everything from Byzantine to modern institutional"): an unnamed political prisoner in an unnamed state.

The reader confidently pronounces himself in Kafka country and prepares to stalk long antiseptic corridors in search of that unnamed chief clerk known to Kafka as God. But Sloan's complexity makes Kafka seem elementary stuff. Mixing diaries, psychiatrists' reports, and computer printouts, Sloan systematically undermines the original account of Comrade V. by offering alternative versions:

Is V. really a political deviationist being brainwashed by Big Brother, or is he a monomaniac who only thinks he is a mathematician and only supposes he is being persecuted? Or is V. perhaps a gifted psychiatrist pretending to be a monomaniac who role-plays as a mathematician?

As the author invites the thoroughly turned-around reader to consider these possibilities, Sloan's literary master seems less Kafka than Jorge Luis Borges. He writes dazzling mini-essays on schizophrenia, stoicism, and the role of the artist in relation to society as if his own definition of an artist's job were, in William Gass's memorable phrase, "to canonize confusion."

Unpredictably clever, obscurely erudite, obstinately elusive about answering his own questions, Sloan could be the Comrade V. of novelists: the talebearer as dehumanized intellect. But he is not--quite. As in his first novel, War Games, brilliance is redeemed by anguish--evidence that Sloan's passion is not for the labyrinth but for the people trapped in it. And to potential subway-syndrome readers, this makes all the difference. "Melvin Maddocks

PAPERBACKS

Recent and Recommended

The following titles, reviewed in TIME when originally published in hardcover, are being released this spring as paperbacks.

FICTION

The Abortion by Richard Brautigan

(Pocket)

The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley

Elkin (Pocket)

A Cry of Absence by Madison Janes

(Pocket)

Birds of America by Mary McCarthy

(N.A.L)

Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy

(Dell)

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (Bantam)

Ali and Nino by Kurban Said (Pocket)

NONFICTION

The Grandees fay Stephen

Birmingham (Dell) Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by

Dee Brown (Bantam) 365 Days fay Ronald J. Glasser

(Bantam) The Female Eunuch fay Germaine

Greer (Bantam) How to Survive in Your Native Land

by James Herndon (Bantam) Getting Back Together by Robert

Houriet (Avon) Our Gang by Philip Roth (Bantam)

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