"All Mp-Mp"

INKY DARKLING (298 pp.)--Louis Grudin--Dial ($3.50).

The experimental writers of the early 20th century were men and women with a high sense of mission. Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf--each sought a new way to get some of the juice of life on to the printed page. Their imitators have chiefly proved that most of them are. in a broad sense, inimitable.

Poet Louis (The Outer Land) Grudin is to James Joyce what dozens of novelists have been to Hemingway and Proust--an eager copycat who asserts his right to look at his king, even if it leaves him crosseyed. Joyce showed how multiple ideas and emotions get tangled together in the human mind, and how the mention of one thing suggests other quite different things which happen to be "associated," through the sound and look of words.

Poet Grudin's aim is simply to do the same job all over again in a Times Square accent. His hero is "Louie Bloom Jerce, the inky darkling," i.e., a Joycean "jerk" whose attachment to writing has made him black as ink and a bit of an Irish "darlin"' into the bargain. This opus is Inky's "histree" -- which means, of course, both "his tree" and personal "history." Inky admits that, unlike Jerce, he is not much of a scholar -- "the penalty for not sticking to my last from the first." He advises people to "get a card in the public liebury and dig in a couple of good books" -- which means that a library is a place where good books are apt to get buried and need to be dug out before they can be dug into. As far as can be gouged. Inky has spent his life waisting his talons in an advertising agency ("That's the whey he was"). He has a Jewish mother-in-law who speaks with "an ageless bit of Joycey sholem asholem humorwit" -- except when she takes out her teeth and talk." becomes Inky "all is fond mp-mp of when the she country, [tries] to and believes that a man should be individualistic, even at the risk of being dubbed a "darestedly commonuts anniekist."

For close to 300 pages Author Grudin makes puns and word plays on such simple matters, and although his book (which he slapped toegather in less than four months) is hard going, selected lines might be used for a parlor game, the prize going to the one who extracts the most "associations" in the least time. It can then lie buried, for it will not go down in his tree.

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