Summer Fiction

By R.Z. Sheppard, John Skow, JAY COCKS, Lance Morrow and Otto Friedrich

MUMBO JUMBO

by ISHMAEL REED

223 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

The travesty of minstrelsy was that a white man in black face could get a laugh cheap because anything black was considered funny. Ishmael Reed (The Free-Lance Pall-Bearers) is a black man in white face who doesn't miss a travesty. Anything white or even tan is ripe for his satire.

Reed's targets have been around at bargain prices for some time, but his laughs are not cheap. The outrageousness of his comic vision and the sinister coils of his prose beg comparison with William Burroughs. Survivors of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance may also be reminded of the orneriness of George Schuyler, the Black Mencken. Mumbo Jumbo is set--or rather cut loose--in the Harlem of the '20s, although Reed's ideas of renaissance slide all the way back to ancient Egypt. Like a street-hustling Norman O. Brown, Reed jives Western civilization into its mythological parts. There is the power of light, reason and uptightness, and the power of darkness, fertility and all those good, dirty down-home things.

In his scatological rereadings of history, Reed comes up with an idea called Neo-HooDooism, a pastiche of an imaginary, ancient African aesthetic and a rip-off from the HooDoo coven of black poets to which Reed belongs. What plot there is to Mumbo Jumbo deals with a search for the ancient, original HooDoo text.

The essential spirit of HooDoo is called Jes Grew. It slips into New Or leans and spreads across the country like a science-fiction plague. It is the jazz in the Jazz Age. Even Warren G. Harding is reported locked in the Lincoln Bedroom listening to The Whole World Is Jazz Crazy. Ranged against Jes Grew are the forces of the Wallflower Order (read those who do not dance).

Reed himself keeps prancing on his drum, preaching the glories of HooDoo culture. It is a welcome alternative to the bludgeoning lectures of LeRoi (Imamu Baraka) Jones. Or is it? The club is a quicker and more merciful weapon than the feather. --R.Z. Sheppard

STAY HUNGRY

by CHARLES GAINES

262 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

Charles Gaines' first novel is one of those rascally, agreeable rarities whose wobbles the reader is willing to indulge all night. Stay Hungry reports with much energy and mild astonishment the adventures of a moneyed Southern loafer, Craig Blake, who falls among body builders. Blake, who is 30 or so, owns half of a real estate agency in Birmingham but cannot be bothered with it.

Instead he wanders from one expensive muscular pursuit to another, shooting rapids and doves, fishing wahoo and tarpon, doing each deed seriously and well with the finest equipment, at precisely the spot in the hemisphere where it is to be done best. No special portent is involved here; one of the novel's considerable virtues is that Blake's frivolous output of ergs is not intended to signify the decline of the West.

He departs from this upper-class play pattern when he stops at the colossal illuminated sign of the Olympic Studio and Spa, featuring Joe Santo, Mr. Alabama. The studio, an upholstered gym, does a good business jiggling lard off businessmen, but Blake has no interest in that. What shakes his unsuspecting soul is the weight room, the preserve of the body builders--grotesque, protein-stuffed Narcissuses, men intent on becoming planets.

Most of the builders, as Blake is warned, are rough as cobs. But Joe Santo, whose lats and traps are so spectacular that he is a cinch to become Mr. Southeast, is another matter. He is not only an athlete of mythic skill but a knockabout saint whose sort last surfaced in the works of Kerouac and Kesey. In short, he is good, clean wish fulfillment, and author and hero fall in love with him, in the manner of small boys. Santo does an impromptu star turn at a rodeo, befriends and soothes some strung-out hippies, and finally hands over his golden girl friend to Blake.

What is very good in the novel is Blake's undeluded but cheerful acceptance of people and things that he knows are both second-rate and a bit flaky. Body building is both, but Blake is curious, and what the hell, largeness is all. Charles Gaines, who is able to write about muscular matters without sounding as if he were arm wrestling with Hemingway's ghost, is as fascinated by the body builders as his hero Blake is, and he gives their posing contests a kind of loopy dignity.--John Skow

STRANGE PEACHES

by EDWIN SHRAKE

375 pages. Harper's Magazine Press.

$7.95.

Still shy of 30, the hero of this Gatling-gun novel has been a reporter, an on-camera TV newsman and an actor whose best-known performances were as Tarzan and a cowpoke on a foolish series called Six Guns Across Texas. John Lee Wallace, fed up with Hollywood, returns home to Dallas, leaving a vapor trail of dope and alcohol. He and his best buddy Buster plan to make "one good, true, fair thing"--a documentary film about the real Texas. The time is the late summer of 1963.

As John Lee shoots his footage, Author Shrake captures superbly the feeling of combustible chaos that climaxed in the Kennedy assassination. Senile billionaires, rabid right-wing executives of shadow corporations, cheap crooks, displaced cowboys, and kids who stay well stoned and let it all float right on by, even Jack Ruby--Shrake molds them all into his amphetamine apocalypse.

He also manages shrewdly to show how fitting it was that the dream of the last decade should have ended in Dallas. John Lee Wallace, his spirit restless, his head forever fogged in, makes an appropriate guide for this descent into hell. But Author Shrake, who has kept his distance from John Lee throughout most of the book, ends by indulging in a little unnecessary hero worship. After Nov. 22, the story shifts to Acapulco, where John Lee and his girl get mixed up in a gunrunning, dope-smuggling scheme that is crazily uncoordinated with the Texas part of the book. The nightmare dwindles down to a good-old boy's yarn that got out of hand, and a novel that first threatens to explode fizzles out like a firecracker tossed into a puddle.--Jay Cocks

ACTION

by JAMES GUETTI 280 pages.

Dial Press. $6.95.

Theoretically, gambling ought to be an interesting obsession. In this engaging first novel James Guetti is not always certain just what the obsession is: an untrammeled subculture with openings to the metaphysical or merely a shabby compulsion that can absorb the addict to the point of rendering every thing else in his life irrelevant. Yet it is precisely that ambivalence that makes his book interesting.

The protagonist, a young teacher named Phil Hatcher, is a compulsive player of horses, poker, craps -- any ritual of chance on which he can stake his life or his rent money. His marriage goes, his career more or less disintegrates, but the "action" remains. Gambling -- worked at, lovingly labored over, the Morning Telegraph studied with a Talmudic precision -- becomes the last pure arena of sheer individualistic intellect: the mind in combat with the odds. Guetti's scenes at Aqueduct and Monmouth Park, at craps tables and poker parties, have a tense authenticity. Thousands of dollars roll in and out with a blind, tidal rhythm. Meantime, Hatcher's wife, already effectively widowed, drifts off to find a life outside of her husband's elaborate and demanding fantasies.

Perhaps because he is a gambler himself, Author Guetti provides Hatcher with a complete metamorphosis from professor to high roller. When last seen he is heading south in a Cadillac for more action.--Lance Morrow

THE PRIVATE SECTOR

by JOSEPH HONE

314 pages. Dutton. $7.95.

This stylish thriller is yet another stop on the Greene-Ambler-Deighton-LeCarre circuit. In his first novel, Dublin-born Joseph Hone follows the impeccable existentialist formula in which the spy is the victim, doomed to suffer betrayals and failures as remote as the stars from his control.

For Peter Marlow trouble begins when London sends him to Cairo to find another British agent, named Henry Edwards, who has mysteriously disappeared. Unknown to Marlow, of course, Edwards is actually a triple agent (Moscow as well as London and Cairo), and Cairo's omniscient Colonel Hamdy is determined to kill Edwards because Hamdy is himself a triple agent (Tel Aviv too). The Israelis have tipped Colonel Hamdy that Edwards is about to expose all their spies in Cairo, but they got that tip from Edwards' own boss in London, who is also, inevitably, still another Soviet agent. And so on.

Confusing? Yes. No connoisseur of the genre would accept less. Yet the best parts of Hone's espionage novel have nothing to do with espionage. His hero, far from being the traditional gun-and-karate spy, is a mournful reincarnation of the wandering Irishman, someone whose way of escaping from Egypt is to hitch a ride on a Land Rover with an Anglican clergyman who is setting off with beagle-like optimism to expand the parish in the Saharan sands around Tobruk.

Best of all, Hone provides a portrait of Nasser's Cairo that occasionally reads like updated Lawrence Durrell --a city of dusty cricket fields and sweet coffee and the khamsin rustling the jacaranda trees, a city in which the revolutionary press censor plays badminton on the roof of his apartment house and keeps a suffragi downstairs to retrieve the stray shuttlecocks from the streets below.--Otto Friedrich

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