Erewhonsville

ISLAND (335 pp.)--Aldous Huxley--Harper ($5).

Admirers of those cleverly nasty satires that Aldous Huxley wrote in the '20s and '30s were certain that one day the master's first name would pass into common usage as an adjective: if someone woke up feeling aldous, he would be liverish, cold to the touch and awfully, awfully acute. So it might have happened, except that a time came when Aldous did not feel aldous any more; he felt thomas-henry. And old T. H. Huxley, the novelist's grandfather, was a solemn teacher, not a satirist. The result was that after the aldous Aldous had written Brave New World (a take-off on the sleek horrors of a mass-produced society), the new thomas-henrified Huxley deemed it his duty to map out a utopia for the betterment of the race.

Huxley's utopia is the island of Pala, whose happy inhabitants of mixed Indian, European and native descent have evolved a new form of Mahayanist Buddhism.

They try to achieve tathata (or "such-ness") through prayer, liturgy and ceremonies involving ritual lovemaking and liberal doses of happy pills made from yellow mushrooms. Those who think the only fun in fungi is in a mushroom omelet may be skeptical when they read that things are just short of perfect in Pala--"a small island completely surrounded by twenty-nine hundred million mental cases." And why did not Huxley heed the warning of one of his own characters that "Eastern philosophers are often rather bad talkers"? Weight of Dandruff. Huxley's hero is William Farnaby, a successful journalist who blunders into Pala by inadvertence and a fortuitous shipwreck. In Huxley's eyes, Farnaby represents a sickness in the soul of modern man. With his "flayed ferocious grin," Farnaby is aware of his own wretchedness and the corruption of the world to which he belongs, and there hovers about him a good deal of the sad seediness of the inhabitants of the early Huxley world of London intellectuals. He is like a man whose shoulders sag under the weight of dandruff.

But Farnaby becomes the willing catechumen of Pala's nubile adams and eves, who live in a state of highly sophisticated innocence. In fact, the substance of the book is Farnaby's slow indoctrination into Pala's delights and mysteries, expounded in interminable conversational counterpoint to the corruption of his own world.

Life on Pala has some remarkable features. A 30-night supply of contraceptives is delivered free with the mails once a month. Also there is insemination without intercourse; the best sperm goes into deep freeze so that top citizens may perform patriarchal prodigies of propagation. The normal nuttiness common to man in the demented Outside has been abolished by a program of adoption in which children rotate at will among a committee of 20 sets of parents.

The idea is that if children can change their parents often enough, they will never work up a good Freudian hatred for them. Pain has been abolished through some kind of autohypnosis; local surgeons operate without anesthesia by drugs.

There is no crime. Theft would be pointless in this cooperative little commonwealth. It is vegetarian by principle (though fish are unofficially counted as vegetables). For the dissatisfied, of course, there are always those tasty hallucinogenic toadstools.

Nowhere & Serutan. The best parts of Pala--and reading about Pala--constitute an intellectual teaser in the best Huvley tradition. It is when Huxley is undertaking to describe the spiritual Himalayas of his fictional Utopias that his prose, always as smooth as yak butter, begins to smell like the same spread. To cut some of the butter, Huxley even provides a snake in his paradise, a local fascist princeling who advocates things like fast cars, Progress, Values, Oil and True Spirituality. In the end, he manages to organize a revolution against Pala's benevolent philosopher rulers, and "the work of 100 years is destroyed in a single night." Island, the work of nine years, was also nearly destroyed in a single night in the recent Hollywood fires, when Huxley's house burned to the ground. The manuscript was one of the few things saved.

But even Huxley seems to realize, not so much that human perfection is unobtainable, but that it is not interesting. For Utopias are about nowhere and novels are about somewhere; therefore, a Utopian novel is a contradiction in terms.

Huxley's Pala is at least as explorable as Herman Melville's Typee and more believable than Samuel Butler's Erewhon. But a novelist who writes about erewhon goes against his Serutan. which, as all the world knows, is nature's spelled backwards. Pie in the sky, however deep dish. is never as fascinating as the hard crust of the satirist.

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