Pilgrim's Regress

By Martha Duffy

ALINSKY'S DIAMOND

by TOM McHALE

335 pages. Lippincott. $8.95.

Perhaps every good young writer should be allowed a book like this one. Still it is a notable disappointment. Three years ago, McHale published two exhilarating novels in quick succession: Principato and Farragan's Retreat. In both he revealed wild comic gusto, a youthful, vengeful rage at certain vagaries of the Roman Catholic Church, and a visceral knowledge of middle-class Irish and Italians around Philadelphia and the Jersey shore. McHale was never a stylist; he made up in energy what he lacked in elegance.

In Alinsky's Diamond he quits his familiar landscape and sets out on a literary crusade nearly as unfortunate as the one he describes in this novel. In the beginning, Francis X. Murphy, from Aruba, Ohio, is rotting away in a French chateau. He has married a baron's daughter and ruined her family -- indeed the whole village of Vardille-sur-Lac -- by being caught doctoring the local wine. As penance, Murphy resolves to drink himself to death by swallowing all 12,000 unsalable bottles.

At this stage, Murphy becomes a likely victim for some charlatans who want to start a "pilgrimage" to Jerusalem, covered by French television and ostensibly aimed at inspiriting religion generally and raising the nation's spiritual tone. Of course its organizers have other, quite different plans. So, as it happens, does the author. By the middle of the book, the crusade is all but forgotten, and the reader has become enmeshed in the travails of a fabulously rich Israeli named Meyer Alinsky who, it turns out, has all along had his own special uses for poor Murphy. Alinsky's Diamond is not so much a case of an overcomplicated plot, in fact, as a whole flea market full of story lines.

Though at first McHale's worst problem seems to be the exhausting narrative, the real dilemma is that for the first time he is writing about people he does not know. The crusaders, the thugs, the conmen in these pages are strangers to the author. McHale has clearly shown that he can be a dazzling extemporizer, but he badly needs familiar roots. The very restlessness demonstrated in Alinsky's Diamond may contribute to something enduring in the future. For now, though, McHale's imagination can do without this kind of exotic melodrama. > Martha Duffy

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