Laugh track

By Paul Gray

SUDER by Percival L. Everett

Viking; 171 pages; $13.50

The hero of this first novel is a black third baseman with the Seattle Mariners named Craig Suder. Given the salaries and perks enjoyed by contemporary athletes, Suder's position on and off the field would seem to be enviable. Unfortunately, he has a few problems, including a batting average of .198: "Things are bad. I can't make love to my wife, I can't run bases, and I couldn't get a hit if they was pitching me basketballs underhanded. And my kid hates me. To top it off, I got a bum leg that don't hurt." Manager Lou Tyler is solicitous, if gruff: "Now, about that slump of yours. You know, it wasn't but a few years ago that you blacks was allowed in this league. The way you been playing lately, they might kick you all out."

Suder harbors the dark fear that his difficulties are not physical but mental. He thinks he may be going crazy, just as his mother did one summer during his childhood. She started wearing high-top sneakers with her winter coat and went into training to run around the perimeter of Fayetteville, N.C. She also fawned over her son and told him: "You're not like your father. You're like me. You're just like your mother, just like your mother." Understandably, the memory haunts him.

Suder's predicament seems the stuff of sure-fire fiction, an unusual and interesting character struggling with mysterious demons. But after deftly establishing this premise, Rookie Author Percival L. Everett, 26, darts off in another direction entirely. Suder simply walks out on his wife, his team, Seattle. He buys a saxophone and tries to learn to play it like Charlie Parker. He hitches up with an older acquaintance who takes him on a boat ride across Puget Sound. The purpose of the trip turns out to be cocaine smuggling, and Suder manages to push his host overboard and sail off with all the loot. Then he wins an elephant at a carnival and names it Renoir.

People who think pachyderms are intrinsically funny will find the rest of Suder sidesplitting. Renoir certainly provokes his share of double takes. The man robbed by Suder tracks him to a cabin in Oregon, where he notices the large pet: "What's that?" Suder's reply: "That's an elephant." And then there is the joke about Suder's manager, an amateur taxidermist, who shows up unexpectedly and tries to kill Renoir with a chain saw: "I can't wait to stuff this sucker." By now, Suder has acquired other eccentricities. His cabin mate is a nine-year-old girl named Jincy, a runaway from her abusing mother. She comments: "This is weird. I'm in a strange barn, shoveling hay for an elephant that belongs to a nigger." Meanwhile, Suder has decided to build a pair of wings and fly over a nearby body of water called Ezra Pond.

It is impossible to tell just how bananas Suder is supposed to be going; he is the only spokesman for his misadventures and he says he feels better and better. But along the way, Everett's novel develops a severe case of enforced sit-com wackiness. Jokes wag the tale; characters seem willing to do anything for a laugh track. --By Paul Gray This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.