Degeneration of Vipers

OPUS 21 (375 pp.)--Philip Wylie--Rinehart ($3).

The characters in Philip Wylie's new novel include: the amiable madam of a New York call-house, two warm-hearted call-house girls, a nuclear physicist whose atomic know-how is equaled only by his abysmal no-know-how where dames are concerned, a woman who has run away from her botanist husband because she caught him kissing another man in the conservatory, and a Wylie version of Jesus Christ, his name abbreviated to Chris, who shows up in a persistent but inconclusive dream about a B-29 on an A-bomb run. Most of the action takes place in a New York hotel, not far from a doctor's office where the principal character, Philip Wylie (not, Wylie warns, to be confused with Author Philip Wylie) is told on Thursday (when the novel begins) that he probably has cancer, and on Monday (when the novel ends), that he is all right after all.

This skein is thoroughly tangled from the moment Character Wylie comes down to lunch brooding about cancer and finds the botanist's wife, name of Yvonne, who is brooding over Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Wylie quickly recognizes her as "a nice bitch . . . with a father complex" and wins her sympathy by telling her what unkind reviews TIME gives his books. Yvonne tells Wylie all about her experience in the conservatory.

Blue Thursday. The idea is forming in Wylie's mind that Yvonne is really suffering from "vestiges of ... Episcopalian superego" and that it can only be cured by her indulging in a bit of homosexuality herself, when in charges Nuclear Physicist Paul Wilson (Character Wylie's nephew: no relation to Author Wylie). His dank hair is trailing over his forehead. "I'm in love," he cries. "And the girl's a whore." Character Wylie, whose air of learned sang froid is notable throughout the novel, takes one look at the girl, name of Marcia, and makes another fast diagnosis: she is a raving nymphomaniac and wholly unsuited to a career of nuclear research.

What to do? Character Wylie reflects that all these human misfits are signs of "the land I love deteriorating, the world I adore growing ever more miserable." He feels "lonelier than God," exhausted by his "endless efforts to put a simple idea in some form that would perfuse skulls hardened against it." It is a rough weekend for a man who thinks he is dying: Yvonne, fired by her instincts, hammers incessantly on his bedroom door; Marcia leaves Paul, and he poises himself on the terrace ledge and threatens a 16-story jump into Madison Avenue.

White Monday. But by Monday, all is well. Yvonne has had an affair with a floozy named Gwen and has thereby lost her anti-botanical prejudices. Marcia has gone back to the call-house where she belongs. Paul is in a hospital, sadder and wiser. And Character Wylie's cancer turns out to be just a "rare lymphatic growth."

This fantastically bad novel is built around a single, anguished theme--Author Wylie's teeth-grinding grief that the world turns its back on his views. In Generation of Vipers, where his views made a little sense, however overstated they may have been, Wylie was impressive for his stark anger at the course of U.S. civilization. In Opus 21, he buries a few pinheads of truth so deep in bad taste and bad writing that his message, if any, is lost in the muck, and his jeremiad itself is silly.

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