Books: Never Say Die

THE SUICIDE ACADEMY by Daniel Stern. 173 pages. McGraw-Hill. $5.95.

Outrageous subjects that were once shocking sources of satanic laughter now seem hardly ticklish at all. Black Comedians today tend to be admired like TV gagmen and nightclub acrobats —less for jolt than for sheer agility.

In that class, Daniel Stern, a critic-novelist (After the War, Miss America) long preoccupied with the dusty corners of the modern soul, proves a deft performer. His literary colleague Kurt Vonnegut recently toyed with industrialized suicide (Welcome to the Monkey House), but only as an example of the dehumanized modern world efficiently eliminating Malthusian excess. Stern’s Suicide Academy, by contrast, has a more promising metaphoric reach.

In Stern’s establishment, the clients come for one day only. With the aid of a scrupulously neutral staff, they are measured and examined. Between bouts of play and sleep, they study their own lives and the world, life wish and death wish together. Then comes calm choice —a return to the world or death, an end reached through a wide range of means provided by the management. Suicides, Stern observes, are the graduate students of the academy.

Trying to preside over it all is Wolf Walker, a troubled escapee from a Hasidic Jewish boyhood. For him—head still throbbing with Talmudic commentary and heart still wrung by questions of moral choice—the academy is a refuge from his own perplexed humanity. Armed with tough talk (“Suicides are like children. You have to know when to ignore them”), he struggles to give academy inmates a fairer choice than they ever got in the real world. At the same time, he fights off board members who are chiefly interested in getting the would-be suicides to leave their money to the academy.

Bit Player. Is Wolf God? Or merely man trying to spell God with the wrong mental blocks? Either, or both, is possible. Wolf’s academy seems a splendid microcosm for mirroring a civilization and its discontents. Unhappily, as the book progresses, Stern slights the academy in favor of a labyrinthine exploration of Wolf’s hang-ups. To the useful tale of his youth, Stern ties a string of current circumstances, including a preposterously pregnant ex-wife and a mad film director whose sole purpose is to prove that God, man and Wolf are all prisoners of their past.

The Suicide Academy is left as a palatial metaphor hardly explored and barely furnished. It is largely unpeopled, too, except for Wolf’s assistant, a splendidly grotesque, wasp-tongued Negro named Gilliatt. Archly antiSemitic, he quotes upbeat Talmudic texts to needle Wolf, and continually accuses him of secretly sabotaging the academy’s sacred neutrality in favor of life. Gilliatt reasons that the Jews invented resurrection and so are rotten with humanitarian sympathy. Gilliatt may be the best bit-part player of the literary year.