Dies Irae

By Paul Gray

Dies Irea

KILLING EVERYBODY by MARK HARRIS 277 pages. Dial Press. $6.95.

Mr. Brown, the protagonist of Mark Harris' new novel, is a man who cannot even bring himself to exterminate a neighbor's annoying dog. Yet his mind is a charnel house of potential victims, executed because he thinks nearly everyone around him helped send his mistress's son to death in Viet Nam. Incurably infected by the anger and violence of the past decade, Brown fires off anonymous and threatening letters to presidents, neighbors, even chance acquaintances who displease him.

His city is a surrealized San Francisco. The time is a lobotomized and indeterminate version of the present. All occasions conspire against reason, order, simple human comprehension.

During the novel's 24 hours, citizens line up obediently to vote for the congressional candidate who, as chairman of the local draft board, channeled Brown's surrogate son into the swamps of Southeast Asia. Ubiquitous television sets keep vigil over three astronauts lost on a return flight from the moon. Murder in his mind, anguish in his heart, Brown must pace through his daily routine while mutely suffering Lear's rage at the fly that outlives Cordelia.

He keeps bumping into people who have unknowingly heard from him before; perhaps his anonymous letters have saturated the city. Some, like a colleague who had once received a "friendly" warning about his body odor, learn of Brown's intercession in their lives as the day proceeds. Instead of angering them, this knowledge only distracts them from their own fantasies. In fact, they too would do what Brown does if they dared -- or cared enough. Exposed to the same public madness, the characters have come to share a repertory of private images and symbols. Most of ten these involve violence and sex, but -- incongruously -- wisps of sympathy and humor arise at moments when mutual obsessions touch.

Mark Harris, 50, has always worked a vein of comedy bordering on moral outrage. Even his pastoral baseball nov els of the '50s (The Southpaw, Bang the Drum Slowly) were brushed with sad ness. The undertone of finely controlled anger that ran through Harris' early works grew, in the '60s, into the hectoring shrillness of a prophet scorned.

He dismantled Richard Nixon in Mark the Glove Boy (1964), only to watch his intended victim move on to even greater heights -- or depths as Harris would see it. As a college professor at San Francisco State, Harris might well have absolved himself from responsibility for what he seems to see as his country's race toward madness. But a novelist who sets himself up as a lecturer, instructing foolish readers and characters alike, is in even more trouble than they are.

Killing Everybody is a fortunate fall from lofty disgust. Harris has captured the pathology of the present age with out gloating over it or surrendering to despair. His characters are victims, but they have shored large fragments of human vitality against their ruin. If Killing Everybody is uneven, it is also per meated by a compelling amalgam of rage and love.

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