The Quick-Disposal Doubt

A FORTUNE IN DIMES (338 pp.)--Mary Carter--Atlantic-Little Brown ($4.95).

"Life in California" has long been reserved as a stock headline in The New Yorker for items indicating that something more rich and strange than ordinary human life goes on out there. West Coast Novelist Mary Carter also argues that California, specifically Pasadena, is a special enclave within the Affluent Society --more trouble-free, less wrinkle-prone, where nothing intrudes to clutter up the sunny living space but the quick-disposal doubt.

Teen culture embraces all generations in Pasadena, and Novelist Carter's hero shows how painless is the cure for a small case of doubt in the full, rich, empty life. He is Decker Wells, 6 ft. 3 in. tall, a high school senior about to become a freshman at U.C.L.A.. where his major will be "kind of general, maybe I'll end up in business administration." With his fellows he stands "in a lump," distinguishable only by name, weight, hair coloring, and small variables within high-bracket Pasadena youth society.

Brownie Points. Unlike Salinger's magic Holden Caulfield, Decker is inarticulate, and the internal musings of this gilded mooncalf are gruesomely awkward. When he behaves well, he thinks of himself as "making Brownie points humanwise." Others undertake to explain him to himself, like his college roommate. He is a Siwash Indian who is the first of his tribe to go to college, but he tells Wells: "You fascinate me, Wells. You are untouched. No diseases of the outside world have tinged you. You're part of an aboriginal race, maybe. I wonder if it has something to do with the climate in Pasadena . . . the anthropologists are wrong. Leisure doesn't always lead to culture."

As anthropology, Mrs. Carter's guided tour of the Pasadena paradise is indeed fascinating. The pattern of the perfect life is disturbed by nothing but slight cases of alcoholism or mismating outside the tribe. Mother worries that Decker might get hooked on a starlet and bring on Jerry Giesler with a paternity case. Sister has already married a mathematician from Cal Tech, who appears to her as a wonderful being, "exotic and remote as a maharajah"--but who makes less money than the gardener. Decker's father--still hung up on a bogus buddyhood with war cronies--is a martini-oiled mechanism, a country-club wine-and-food snob and bore. His grandfather is a picture of the indignity of a foolish old age. After a successful life as a real estate shark, the old phony has set himself up disguised as a grizzled sourdough pioneer of the Old West--he came from Iowa--and runs a California-type museum devoted to the world's greatest collection of whorehouse pianos, amassed by himself.

Brief Muddle. Will Pasadena's teenagers, who congest the sands of nearby Balboa like mating seals, detach themselves from the herd and grow up to be men and women? It seems unlikely. Only death, like poverty or God, an unmentionable fact of life, offers Decker a vision of life in its grave reality. He flunks a child-watching chore, and his little cousin Buddy dies a Californian death by surfboard. This muddles him for a time, but we are given to understand he will soon settle down to life with the other seals. One of his friends, however, is moved by the event to chuck the good life and become a monk. The motivation of this holy man may puzzle the reader, though it is suggested that life in a monastery is at least one way out of Pasadena--as drink is said to be the quickest way out of Philadelphia.

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