Fun City

By John Skow

FALLING BODIES by SUE KAUFMAN 270 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

The familiar genre of this novel: Every Nacht is Walpurgisnacht in the East Sixties. Its equally familiar subgenre is Highly Intelligent Young Upper Middle-Class Married Woman With a Screw Loose Wobbles About Manhattan In State of Distraction, Nervously Hailing Taxicabs. If that seems to cut subgenres rather fine, novels exactly fitting the description have been appearing every six weeks or so for several years now. In fact, the Nervously Hailing Taxicabs category is as easily recognizable as that now defunct tribe of novel, popular in the '50s, in which young men in gray flannel suits brooded about whether the ad biz was worth it.

The narrator of Falling Bodies is Emma Sohier, once a brilliant student of literature at Radcliffe, now alas, sunk in apartment-wifery. Emma has sat a deathwatch as her mother died horribly, then she herself spent a month in the hospital with a mysterious fever. While there, she saw the body of a suicide plunge by her window. She cannot make herself walk the city for fear that some body will land on her head.

The author also wrote Diary of a Mad Housewife. Her fine, deadpan humor this time lies in the narrator's calm assumption that these hideosities, and others, are quite normal. Emma's eleven-year-old son has changed, for no clear reason, from a bright little boy into a neurotic homunculus. Her husband, slyly cast as a successful publishing exec, is an insane hypochondriac and grunting lecher. Worst of all, her cheerful, friendly black maid, who quit some time ago to start a catering business, is hired to run one of Emma's dinner parties and turns up utterly transmogrified into a hostile militant.

The novel ends, appropriately, in an electricity blackout. So phantasmagoric is the normal life of the Sohier family and their friends that the power failure does not seem to alter their behavior dramatically. If these people were germs on one of those glass plates used in general-science courses, they would be the kind that mad Army biologists yearn to drop on Russia. But they move, thrive and incontestably have life. Whether this is a good thing or not is a judgment the author does not make.

John Skow

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