Nightclub of the Mind

THE EGG OF THE GLAK AND OTHER STORIES by Harvey Jacobs. 276 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

Who would believe that when Movie Stars Jason Briar and Monica Ploy went on their publicity-stunt retreat in an abandoned abbey on the California coast they were nearly eaten by a scaly sea monster? Gossip Columnist Harriet Troom would, but then she actually was eaten by the monster when she sought out Jason and Monica for an exclusive. And who would believe that? Nobody, but the whole satirical fantasia on the Burton-Taylor legend in Harvey Jacobs' story In Seclusion is so funny that it doesn't matter.

Belief is not an issue in Jacobs' bizarre, mainly urban fairy tales. He is essentially a monologist, and his effect depends not so much on the credibility of his characters or incidents as on the incredibility of his language. He is a not-so-ancient mariner of kitsch, whose voyages seem mostly to have been out of the sovereign state of innocence via the borscht circuit. He re-enacts them repeatedly under assumed names in this, his first collection, emerging from a Jewish childhood on Manhattan's Lower East Side, mournful yet wide-eyed, trying to gain his fortune and lose his virginity without missing a single opening for a gag.

True, his timing is not always as good as it is in, say, Reasons of Health, where a character who is as sound and as stupid as a melon is kept in expensive quarantine in Teheran by an Iranian con man posing as a health official. Jacobs is all surface manner, often on the verge of lapsing into mannerism. Sentimental background music swells too resoundingly over some of his wry endings. Rarely touching the deeper implications of his themes, perhaps for fear of losing the rhythm of his routines, he often fails to provide enough serious relief to all the comedy.

Just when the reader, thinking he has had enough, starts to get up and walk out of this nightclub of the mind, Jacobs takes a breath and launches into another of his characteristic openings: "My name is Oliver August. I am friendly, a Moose. I try to believe in disarmament. I cook for a hobby. Every seven years my cells change. But each new cell sings of health and wellbeing. No matter how often I am replaced, I remain formidable. . . . Look into my eyes: rain puddles rich with life. My story should be told." Hypnotized by those glittering rain puddles, the reader is compelled to listen.

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