Something for the Boys

By Helen Rogan

THE FAN CLUB by IRVING WALLACE 511 pages. Simon & Schuster. $9.95.

The Great American Theme flourishing in recent film and fiction concerns the menopausal U.S. male who seems to be burdened by mortgages, a dismal sex life and fallen arches. This sad creature takes the holiday of his dreams, literally, combining hunting and fishing with other manly pursuits, e.g., rape, torture, kidnap and/or murder. Optional extras are sexual deviation, castration and severe mutilation, variously featured in such creations as James Dickey's Deliverance and David Osborn's more recent novel Open Season, a dreadful account of three top Detroit executives who each year put a man and a woman to death for sport. (Says the jacket blurb, a searing portrait "of America in the seventies.")

Irving Wallace has always been trendy. But in his latest package he has modestly chosen to limit himself to kidnaping and rape, perhaps because the good liberal in him balks at going further. The object of Wallace's kidnaping is a Hollywood sex symbol named Sharon Fields, she of the "half-parted moist lips" and "famous bosom." Her captors are Adam, a lust-crazed young writer (wearing, as writers will, "a worn gray cord jacket" and "tight blue knit slacks") and three accomplices, just "ordinary, average men" says Wallace, who naturally turn into "savages bent on satisfying their immediate appetites." Howard Yost, a beefy failed insurance salesman, and Leo Brunner, a mousy, feverish little accountant, are ordinary indeed, but Kyle Shiveley, a psychopathic My Lai veteran with "thin lips" and "cold slate-colored eyes," not to mention his "horrendous apparatus," is hardly the guy next door.

Their immediate appetites receive detailed and very explicit satisfaction for a couple of hundred pages. Then Sharon, who beneath that pneumatic exterior turns out to be as resourceful as a Girl Scout, engineers the bloody downfall of her gruesome band of lovers.

"Body Hugging." Wallace likes to call his books "novels of commitment," although commitment to what (other than the survival of the motion picture industry) is not always clear. In the past he has toiled through sex research in the suburbs, the inequities of book censorship, race and the presidency, a modern religious crisis, and the politics of the Nobel Prize. The fatty results of these labors are always an elaborate story line, with the action dictated by a clash of differing characters. The Fan Club has that kind of plot too, and the idea of a love goddess turned doughty liberationist is a nice embellishment. It is of course ridiculous, but that does not much matter in a book whose characters say things like "We don't have a chance to fulfill such a dream," and young Adam compares Sharon with something out of Christopher Marlowe while noting (always the writer) that the girl is clad in a "body-hugging knit blouse" and "abbreviated leather skirt."

A reasonably good time might be had by all readers who like that sort of grisly fun, were it not for yards of description: "Under the ornate iron chandelier that hung by chains from the center beam was a brown suede sofa opposite three plaid armchairs, with an underslung roughhewn wood table standing in for a coffee table." Not to mention Wallace's customary wallow in research. Here is Adam, musing on civilization: "He had read Margaret Mead's anthropological studies of the Arapesh, the Mundugumor and the Tschambuli societies in New Guinea . . ." His immediate appetite long since sated, the reader nevertheless plows doggedly on, by now too torpid to cry "No more!"

Helen Rogan

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