Death by the Numbers

IN A WILD SANCTUARY by William Harrison. 320 pages. Morrow. $6.95.

For decades after F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, young novelists spent their energies on books about college life suffused with sophomoric philosophizing and romantic despair. Then came J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and a spate of imitative books about troubling and precocious children. Since the late '50s and Jack Kerouac's On the Road, the picaresque adventures of rebellious youth seeking wisdom through forbidden experience have been the dominant theme. Now, perhaps, William Harrison's superb second novel--about four contemporary graduate students and their suicide pact--may bring the literary wheel full circle to the campus scene again.

The machinery of the story is simple. One night, drunk and excited at the sight of blood (from a razor slash on one of their wrists), four young men draw numbers from a hat and seemingly in jest agree to kill themselves in order, without revealing the pact or the motive. The four are loners, dependent upon each other in tangled psychological ways. Adler is a fat, ugly and lonely neuter from the Ozarks, who cannot reconcile his hillbilly background with his aspirations in botany and his love of dance and literature. Pless, a young psychologist whose feelings have been frozen since his father's death in a foolish flying accident, and Stoker, a hopeful writer still struggling with sexual incompetence, grew up together in Florida as the sons of Air Force pilots.

The prime apostle of self-destruction in the group is Clive, a mathematician and galloping fantasist. Deserted by his family and raised in the ghetto, he seems demoniacally set on the destruction of the others. After Stoker presumably jumps off a building and Adler drowns himself in a greenhouse fish tank, Stoker's father--a square but sympathetically drawn colonel--sets out to unravel the mystery and discovers that suicide has turned into murder.

Iago and Clive. Following the four boys and the colonel, the author explores the minds of troubled youth and the sexual and emotional problems of their parents. He also probes the impact of such contemporary events as the Viet Nam War and the cultural anomie that characterizes today's generation gap. In the hands of Clive, even the philosophical jargon of youth becomes a powerful weapon. "The Turks like things broken and helpless. Destruction is a form of possession," he observes in an Iago-like attempt to dominate the inquisitive colonel. "War is the great sexual game. You could say that castration is the goal. And enemies are always, in a sense, lovers. They experience an interesting comradeship in their fear. And the true soldiers--the real killer--is always glad to have an object to murder. He wants to put his training to work and mate with his victim in a little dance of death, you see." And so, it turns out, does Clive.

Exploring the nature of evil is a preoccupation of the author, who teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Arkansas. In his first novel, The Theologian, a young divinity student seeks salvation through extreme sinfulness. This time, by shaping the image of evil as lover and destroyer, Harrison has traced a remarkable voyage into the world of psychological and social morality for an age which seems to have lost its moral bearings.

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