Motormania

CLUTCH AND DIFFERENTIAL -- George Weller--Random House ($2.50).

Most U. S. fiction about the automobile has been of the character of Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout, with only a few novelists making a serious attempt to investigate the social influence of this piece of machinery in U. S. life. Exceptions have been Robert Coates's lyric descriptions of driving in Yesterday's Burdens, Sherwood Anderson's awed observations in Kit Brandon. Last week a 29-year-old novelist made a bold attempt to correct this omission with an extraordinary, 415-page work of fiction in which the automobile, with its moving parts, time payments and advantages as a theatre for youthful lovemaking, served as the central figure. Not exactly a novel, Clutch and Differential is by George Weller, whose first book, Not to Eat, Not for Love, published three years ago, was a witty college story laid in his alma mater, Harvard. The elusive theme of his new work is taken from an automobile sales circular: "Bodies never cease changing . . . but power in motor vehicles is still infused at the clutch and discharged through the differential. Beneath American-made bodies that are tastefully refashioned every year, power transmission has gained a standard performance. New bodies come and old bodies go but clutch and differential now change but little." Written in a technique that owes something to John Dos Passes, something to James Joyce, Clutch and Differential is made up of 35 long episodes dealing with characters who bear little apparent relation to each other. Stripped of its complicated gadgets, it could be mistaken for a collection of oldfashioned, highwheeled short stories. But 18 of George Weller's episodes are subtitled "clutch" and 17 "differential" and apparently the clutch stories deal with people who are hanging on to money, love or dreams, while the differential ones deal with people who are letting go. Each "clutch" episode is introduced with a little discussion called Shift of Gear and followed by one called Universal, made up of technical automotive instructions directly or obliquely related to the material of that particular episode.

Thus the "clutch" story of an impetuous bridegroom (Would You Marry a College Girl? Yes.) is prefaced with a little monolog about waiting for the delivery of a new automobile. The "differential" story of another young couple (Would You Marry A College Man? No.) begins with factory instructions on breaking in a new car, a theme whose smutty possibilities are as obvious as they are outworn. Some times Weller grinds his gears pretty badly in shifting from one tale to the next; sometimes the transitions are lightly made.

Major weakness of Clutch and Differential is his tendency to ride his theme so hard it becomes burlesque, to cheapen the wit of his stories with sophomoric horseplay.

The stories themselves range widely, are marked with sharp observation, originality, occasional repetitiousness. Each successive story deals with an older character, the first four with small children, the last three with oldsters. One tells of a little girl sitting in a closet thinking of the death of her baby brother. In another a schoolboy becomes uncomfortably aware of his mother's jealousy of his teacher. One tells the story of a Negro porter on a cross-country bus, another the troubles of two young mechanics whose garage business is threatened by the arrival of a blonde.

Excelling in his portraits of children and young married folk. Author Weller finds his hardest going in sketches of addled Bohemians and wistful old maids, breaks down entirely in his account of a nudist, makes little progress with his concluding story of an aged widow who looks forward to still greater mechanical marvels and wants to live to see them. His book is too crowded with well-to-do eccentrics to be a representative U. S. study. But literary motorists will object most to its pace, and reflect that no nation of murderously fast drivers ever chugged along so safely below the speed limit as do the slow characters of Clutch and Differential.

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