Books: Badgered in the Groin

THE HONEY BADGER by Robert Ruark. 569 pages. McGraw-Hill. $6.95.

Author Robert Ruark (Something of Value, Uhuru) died last July at the age of 49, and in this big, brawling blatantly autobiographical novel, completed a few months before his death, he has composed his own obituary.

The hero of the book is named Alec Barr. Like the author, he was born poor in North Carolina, went to college at Chapel Hill, hired on as a general reporter for the Washington Daily News, soon started a syndicated column, and in recent years made big money and a big name with a brace of bestsellers about Africa in transformation. The story of the hero’s public life is superficial but exciting; the details of his private life are clinical and, with the hero-author parallel continually implied, embarrassing. As for the women in his life, Ruark compares them to the African honey badger, the meanest animal in the world: “It does not go for the jugular—it goes for the groin.”

The hero, by contrast, comes off remarkably well. He is a “rich, rich writer,” an “incomparable” reporter, an elephant hunter who makes Hemingway look like a boy scout, a backchat merchant who is “one of the funniest men alive,” a “poontang kid” who is “really great in the sack,” a friend of Toots Shor. He is, in fact, a man who has everything—including a couple of things Author Ruark wanted and never quite attained: a Pulitzer Prize and a civilized prose style.