Flimsy Whimsy

FAIRYTALE

by ERICH SEGAL

46 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.

Once upon a time, a writer who was not really a writer but a moonlighting professor of classics at Yale produced a phenomenal bestseller called Love Story. The book had the texture of moist Kleenex, but it was bittersweet and it brought the professor wealth and fame, which he professed to dislike. He gave an endless series of farewell interviews and accepted one absolutely final nonscholarly job after another, from doing TV sports commentary to acting in movies. Yet did all this help him to achieve his ambition of winning the annual 26-mile Boston Marathon? No. He once finished 50th but by 1971, the year after Love Story, he had dropped down to 489th in a field of 887. When he produced his second work of fiction, Fairy Tale, in 1973, he was still not a writer either. In fact, he seemed even less of a writer than before.

Fairy Tale recounted, briefly but tortuously, the adventures of some mountaineers who lived in a region of the Ozarks called Poop's Peak. "From generation to generation," went an all too typical passage, "the Poopers had zealously clung to the truths which made them free. Namely, snoozing and boozing ... The Poopers were congenital shiners of moon, which is to say, hootch hustlers, which is to say, distillers of illegal whisky." When one of them, young Jake Kertuffel, was sent into town to trade in the family jalopy on a new car, he was swindled into accepting a pile of beans on the assurance that a money tree would grow from them. It did, of course, making Fairy Tale a sort of Jake and the moneystalk.

The book little perplexed critics because it fit no classification (always an embarrassment to critics). Was it a put-on? Not likely. A children's story? Perhaps, but not published as one. The truth was, all that chiming rhyming and irritating alliterating were so much flimsy whimsy, which is to say a triumph of the arch, which is to say an exercise in self-consciousness-raising. It was so precious that it was not worth attacking, even as a boiler of pot. Maybe the professor was no more of a long-distance runner in the publishing world than in Boston. In which case the book pointed up a moral (always a comfort to critics). For all its talk of riches, it was really about poverty--of invention. Thus it could be considered not so much a fairy tale as a true confession.

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