Soul on Fire

By R.Z. Sheppard

!CLICK SONG by John A. Williams

Houghton Mifflin; 430 pages; $13.95

Unlike gold prospectors, novelists must pick nuggets out of their heads. Both occupations seem to attract similar characters: stubborn loners who sacrifice time and ties for a big elusive payoff. John A. Williams, 56, has written more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction without striking a mother lode. He is a good writer with a big theme: being black in America. By now every honest citizen should know that racism is a national birth defect, which, in the absence of a cure, requires ceaseless applications of justice. This cry is implicit in Williams' work, though most readers have tired of hearing it. The result is that the author has gained a reputation as best known for being neglected.

!Click Song aims to alter this fate.

Cato Douglass, the novel's slow-burning narrator, has suffered racial prejudice, the sweetened indignities of tokenism and the usual wear and tear of encroaching middle age. He is a writer whose resume has a familiar ring: World War II combat veteran, college on the G.I. Bill, Greenwich Village, Paris, Spain, Bread Loaf and finally a niche in a university English department. (Williams himself is a professor of English at Rutgers University.)

Gifted with imagination and strong ambition, Douglass does not do badly. Agents occasionally treat him as a hot property, publishers are reasonable, and his work is praised as often as it is patronized. He has three fine sons and a loving wife. In contrast, Douglass's old friend and fellow writer Paul Cummings (formerly Kaminsky) is a big success and a splashy suicide. The suggestion is that denying one's heritage, "to drink with another crowd," invites catastrophe. Still, out of this conflict, Cummings writes a novel that wins a National Book Award.

Douglass's reaction: "I suppose that had it not been for the imminent birth of our child, I would have felt a keener jealousy, a deeper bitterness."

Fortunately, he is not always an expectant father. For envy and anger give !Click Song the vitality that compensates for its long discursive narrative. On Cummings' 13-minute appearance with Barbara Walters on the Today show: "I counted, because, with two other black writers, I'd been on her show for nine minutes." On the jailing of a black writer who is a drug addict: "Mailer almost did in his ole lady and got nothing but a slap on the wrist, and here Ike is, doin' it to himself. " On black college students at the affirmative-action gate: "I see them a few years down the line, having smacked the wall, backing away, murmuring, 'I be goin' to figure this out.' " Douglass's own conclusions are black and white, them against us. He carries a revolver, which he once used to drive off attackers while on a civil rights assignment in the South. He nearly strangles a cab driver who refused to stop for him.

There is a touch of bravado fantasy in these defiant acts, as there is when a white woman journalist solicits sex in exchange for a favorable story. Such a thing is possible, but not likely to occur in the heavyhanded, abject way depicted in the book.

But then, !Click Song is not meant to be a felicitous work. Its hero enjoys a certain Homeric exaggeration as he under takes his long journey back from the wars.

The way is blocked by sirens, ogres and, in the literary Establishment, men who have been turned into swine. There is even a faithful Penelope. On the other hand, Cato Douglass is meant to be a star witness for the prosecution of society. In fact, the novel's memoir form ensures that he is always on the stand. His accusations are clear, but his evidence is not easy to sort out. Eloquence is frequently drowned out by bombast, and testimony too often has the imprecision of hearsay. For all its forthright bitterness, !Click Song is guarded. It is as if its author had to keep counting to ten so that he would not explode into autobiography. --By R.Z. Sheppard

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