Trip to a Foreign Land

APPENDIX A by Hayden Carruth. 302 pages. Macmillan. $4.95.

For the 302 pages of this unsettling book, the reader is imprisoned in the mind of a man who has suffered and is now suffering a total nervous collapse. Anybody who wants to know the identity of that man need only "look at the title page," according to Author Hayden Carruth. Carruth's self-described "novel or autobiography or dissertation" is not neatly scissored to easily discernible patterns; rather, it comes spooling off the mind of the narrator in grea loops and tangles of yarn. But its feeling is all of a piece--and chilling in effect.

Throughout the book, in alternating sections, Carruth's narrator presents himself to the reader in a strange double exposure--as he appeared in the early 1950s, when he had his first breakdown, and as he appears now, writing while caring for a deaf-mute as atonement for past sins. In the earlier period the narrator is (as Carruth was) a poet, editor, and a nihilist who thinks that "1 must be really half dead" but is not particularly disturbed by the fact: most of contemporary America, he implies, is in pretty much the same shape. The agent of his undoing is a World War II French waif, Charley Dupont, who "was born in Europe's misery and came to America in his youth, imbued with the irony of hope." Dupont bears a disturbing message: "It's okay to believe," and the grail he seeks is simply citizenship papers.

Charley's wife is, like the narrator, a nothing, and not surprisingly the two nothings mate. As the affair continues, it becomes increasingly important to the two participants to see Charley fail--in his career as an architect and in his quest for citizenship. When Charley passes his citizenship test, his wife runs away with a eunuch. Her desertion drives her narrator-lover into madness.

Anguished in spirit but comic in detail, Author Carruth's convoluted tale is a convincing, step-by-step chronicle of a mind stretching beyond its breaking point. But Appendix A is more than case history. If modern man predicates his behavior on a world of non-meaning, Carruth suggests, even the hint of meaning can cripple him.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.