Books: Study in Hipmanship

SQUARE’S PROGRESS by Wilfrid Sheed. 309 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95.

“You’re not really very interesting, Fred,” muses his waspish wife. “Take away the eyebrows and what have you got?” What you have is a lumbering, complacent insurance salesman of 27 who likes baseball, television, Peanuts, sex and practically everybody he knows. He is too unendurably dull for Wife Alison, a nattering know-it-all who reads Proust and thinks life should be lived as a work of art. She leaves him, goes back to Stapleton, Pa. Shocked into action, Fred quits his job and solemnly sets out to discover how to be hip.

He moves into a dingy Greenwich Village apartment, hits the showier Village bars, tries an affair with a melancholy Village music teacher. It all seems pointless. Maybe abroad? “Rubbing your backside with a colored scarf and squirting wine out of goatskins?” Hopefully he hops off to Spain, moves into a dingy pensión, sits around in cafés with the local American beatniks, even goes off to Morocco for awhile to see if marijuana is the answer. And slowly he discovers what all sensible people know: that all the world over, hips are duller than squares. In the end he returns to the suburbs, his wife returns to him, and they both settle down resignedly to cultivate a sense of irony.

Irony is the keynote to this droll, dry novel. In it Author Sheed, book editor and drama critic for Commonweal, continues the dissection of contemporary life that he began in The Hack. The book is overlong, as though Author Sheed feared that the reader would not easily take his point; and only its protagonist comes vividly to life. But in its cool compassion and amused impatience with self-deceit, it is a perceptive guidebook through the wilds of a modern marriage.