Alkie's Nightmare

THE ENDLESS ROAD (301 pp.)--Roger Treat--Barnes ($3.95).

"Listen, Peter," the voice says, "you're no good. Why don't you jump out the window, Peter?" Trembling, Peter rummages through the wastebasket, runs his tongue feverishly into the necks of the three empty bottles he finds there. Then he sees it on the floor--a quart bottle three-quarters full of bourbon. But a gleaming white boa constrictor is coiled around it, nicking its forked tongue.

Peter lunges for the bottle, despite the snake. He lurches over to the hotel window and begins his inane, compulsive ritual, shouting the names of the Derby winners in backward sequence at the passers-by far below: "Broker's Tip, Burgoo King, Twenty Grand, Gallant Fox ... Flying Ebony. Jump, Peter. Fly like Flying Ebony." Another snake, as big as his thigh, strikes at him. The bottle drops and shatters on the radiator. Sobbing "Leave me alone. No more. No more," Peter collapses across the hotel bed on the bare breast of the nymphomaniacal redhead with whom he is sharing his bender.

Missionary Zeal. Neither the snakes nor the nymphos will leave Peter Fletcher alone, for he is an advanced alcoholic of vaguely endearing charm. However, it is not pleasant to keep Peter's company, and Author Treat, a newspaperman (Connecticut's Danbury News-Times) and "arrested" alcoholic, does not mean it to be.

Written with more missionary zeal than narrative skill, The Endless Road is dedicated to two propositions: 1) the alcoholic is sick, sick, sick; 2) Alcoholics Anonymous offers the only real help.

What the novel shares with The Lost Weekend, a famed and far better book of 16 years ago, is the gift for making the nightmarish thirst and terror of an alcoholic demoniacally real.

At the beginning of Endless Road, Peter Fletcher has already lost a great deal more than a weekend. A onetime athlete, he has lost his physical fitness. He has lost his job as a columnist. He has left his wife Mary, an odd mother-hen type who needed Peter's boozed-up dependence on her as much as he needed booze. The only thing he has not lost is the enduring friendship of Jon Baker, a fellow booze-fighter of yesteryear who has become an apostle of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Everyman's Problem. As Jon tries to pin Peter down long enough to sober him up and give him another last chance, Endless Road becomes a relentless chase sequence through Chicago's flossy and sleazy bars, plush and fleabag hotels, punctuated with impromptu shackups. Contrary to prevalent opinion, Author Treat argues that the real alcoholic is a man of satyrical urges and astonishing potency. At novel's end, a penitently sober Peter is entraining for dry New Mexico desert country--but with his hand ominously poised on the doorknob of the bar car.

Author Treat is utterly convincing when he describes an "alkie" expertly mouth-tipping a martini glass that his hand is too shaky to raise, or the numb, fumbling haze in which minutes, hours and whole days are erased from the calendar. He lacks conviction, or at least a sense of balance, when he fulminates against psychiatry, society and orthodox religion, and soapboxes the reader's ears on the virtues of A. A. (which relies heavily upon religion). Starting from the premise that the alcoholic may be Everyman, Author Treat ironically seems to end up proving the opposite--that the alcoholic is a sectarian in a strange mystical brotherhood in which the only man who has the savvy to salvage a drunk is another drunk.

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