Nit-Picnic

COME WITH ME TO MACEDONIA (344 pp.)--Leonard Drohan--Knopf ($3.95).

A nitpicker is "an incompetent supervisor who generally knows little or nothing about what he is reviewing, but feels that, in order to appear deserving of his position, he ought to criticize something." Having stated this definition. Author Leonard Drohan sets out to harpoon the nit of wit among civil servants and middleweight army brass at a Government bureau, a task about as difficult as shooting a whale in a swimming pool. But Drohan, who has worked in the U.S. civil service off and on since 1942, gets tangled in his unreeling novel and goes down with his quips. Spoofing government may be like spoofing Hollywood--reality is so much more preposterous than any possible fiction. What might have been a sharp-witted satire on boobery among bureaucrats turns out to be a sheepish sermon on sic transit gloria Monday through Friday.

The book's hero is an open-faced, mouse-mannered young GS-7 ($4,525 a year) named Humphrey Hogan, 'whose rise to G59 ($5.440 a year) is blocked by an outrageous menagerie of nitpickers and by his own absence of ambition. But his happy inconsequence irritates a blue-eyed, butterfat young stenographer and she dangles herself in front of Humphrey like a hunk of process cheese. Mouse that he is, he leaps for the bait and begins to assert himself around his office. Abruptly, he is buried under freshly picked nits.' "Kay," he whispers, "you've got the wrong man. I can't change the world." Her reply: "You can change your life, Humph, you can show them all that a civil servant isn't necessarily a deadhead."

There is opportunity for wild humor in the outcroppings Humphrey must negotiate in his scramble to the top--the office sweater girl; an addled old clerk who has sandbagged his office with 67 filing cabinets full of senselessly duplicated detritus dating from 1939: and a villainous colonel whose spit-and-demolish approach to bureaucracy reaches peaks of brassbound unreason. But Drohan shows no real talent for his chosen business, satire; instead, he insists on trying to make the reader take Humphrey's doubts and flounderings seriously. A Candide may get into frightful predicaments, but under the rules of the game, the reader should not be obliged to worry about them without benefit of laughter. An additional liability: a prose style with the numbing quintuplicate cadence of a Government form.

For Government toilers, at least, the book's unsalted satire will be a mouthwatering mess of office gossip. And it is also probable that in these humor-scarce times, the book will become a bestseller. It bears a declaration, signed by Publisher Alfred Knopf personally, to the effect that "I cannot remember when I have laughed so much over a novel." On this evidence, at least. Publisher Knopf is easily amused.

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