Pynchon's Comet

By Paul Gray

RATNER'S STAR by DON DeLILLO 437 pages. Knopf. $10.

A prime characteristic of the pure mathematician is an inability to speak in language that is intelligible to the layman. It follows that any novelist with a 14-year-old mathematical genius as his hero is probably looking for trouble. Ratner's Star, Author Don DeLillo's fourth book, has just such a hero--Billy Twillig--and its problems begin right there. Although Billy has won the only Nobel Prize ever awarded in his field, neither he nor DeLillo can explain much about the nature of "zorgs," Twillig's epochal discovery. Aside from his ineffable talent, Billy is just a wisecracking teen-ager from The Bronx.

DeLillo plunks this passive protagonist down in a futuristic think tank called Field Experiment No. 1. His task, to decode a series of radio pulses being received from the vicinity of a G dwarf designated as Ratner's Star. Billy is soon accosted by a parade of scientists and deep thinkers. Their names (Shlorno Glottic, Grbk, Orang Mohole, Desilu Espy, Hoy King Toy) seem to peg them as refugees from Thomas Pynchon's Central Casting. Their inevitable behavior -- alternately cerebral and cloacal -- confirms the identification.

DeLillo's aim is to show how the codification of phenomena as practiced by scientists leads to absurdity and mad ness. It is not his fault that Pynchon is simply better at weaving advanced science and cartoon characters into a convincing whole cloth. Still, Ratner's Star, for all of its monotonic monologues, of ten displays impressive erudition and the same inebriated infatuation with language that worked so well in DeLillo's End Zone, his surrealistic send-up of football and warfare.

And DeLillo can be funny as well as instructive. One typically addled character calls Cadillac "the Rolls-Royce of automobiles." A scientist, speculating that cosmic growth outward may have ended, imagines a newspaper headline: UNIVERSE SAID TO CEASE EXPANDING; BEGINS TO FALL BACK ON ITSELF; MILLIONS FLEE CITIES.

When it finally comes, the solution to the mystery of those radio pulses is both eerie and intriguing. On the minus side, DeLillo surrounds it with so much sophomoric static that the message is nearly drowned out.

Paul Gray

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