And Quiet Flows the Pecos

VANDENBERG by Oliver Lange. 333 pages. Stein & Day. $6.95.

At its best, pop literature provides a set of tracks along which the reader's fantasies can chug-chug-chug and toot-toot-toot. Len Deighton or Harold Robbins or Erich Segal paints up a few props as passive scenery--model villages with lifelike residents, a plaster panther forever in the act of springing--and the reader's imagination makes it all real. Oliver Lange, for example, posits a brief, one-sided and almost painless Russo-American war--Washington is taken, and that's about it. Afterwards, the Soviets occupy the U.S.

And then? Well, it depends on what the reader has in mind. But to help him out, the author furnishes costumes and scenery for two of the era's pervasive daydreams. One is that of facing the Grand Inquisitor, having one's day in a hopelessly hostile court. The other is that of taking to the hills, a self-reliant survivor, after the big war.

Vandenberg is neither a Senator nor an Air Force base; he is a beat-up, bad-tempered, 50-year-old New Mexico artist who is suspected of political deviation by the Soviet occupation forces. He is arrested and sent to a maximum-security rehabilitation camp.

The prison routine is not brutal, merely demeaning. Its intent is simply to ensure that the ablest Americans will be cooperative members of a smoothly functioning society. Vandenberg, who was a truculent dropout from the old society, likes the new one even less. There are moments when the interrogation scenes are better than pop and appear to be building toward a chilling foreview of post-modern society. So much that Vandenberg's therapist-interrogator says is plainly reasonable; the Soviets, by his plausible account, really are providing the greatest good for the greatest number. Very briefly, the reader is reminded of the coldly logical dialogues in Darkness at Noon between the old Bolshevik Rubashov and his inquisitor, Gletkin. But little in Vandenberg's sulky response is heroic, or even intelligent. In effect, he simply shrugs. He is not interested in the greatest number. All he wants is for society to leave him alone.

Nerve and high intelligence are needed to write at Koestler's level, and Author Lange does not seem to have either. The power of Darkness at Noon lay in the fact that the inquisitor Gletkin, proceeding logically and fairly from Rubashov's own assumptions, forced him to assent to the value of his own execution. Lange, on the other hand, flies into fantasy. There is a power failure at the brain laundry, and Vandenberg climbs the electric fence and escapes.

The remainder of the book is pure John Wayne. The ending is suitably devastating, as bits of everyone, wind-borne, ride off into the sunset.

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