Books: Sad to Be Mad

THE FUGITIVES (260 pp.)—Robert Gutwillig—Little, Brown ($3.75).

Much modern fiction seems to have been written as part of a campaign to stamp out mental health, and this deceptively jaunty novel heightens the impression by setting much of its narrative in a madhouse. The Haven is no snakepit but a kind of Gothic prep school for a world into which the inmates hope never to graduate. (The reader, incidentally, knows it is a madhouse because the Princeton man running round the Christmas tree is wearing a boater with orange-and-black band, but nothing else.)

In After Long Silence (TIME, May 19), talented young U.S. Novelist Gutwillig, 27, demonstrated a familiarity with the Beat Generation, which looks at life and lies around clogging things up; in The Fugitives he reasserts his sympathies with those who look at life and take it on the lam. Under the benevolent despotism of Dr. McCrindle, the Haven is full of people harmless except to themselves. It is a liberal society despite a reactionary old party who keeps crossing out names in her copy of the Social Register. Two men perpetually play chess without chessmen. There is also an artist, “just another third-rate artist,” who keeps working away, by the dim light of a dim talent. But Novelist Gutwillig’s main concern is with Stevie Freeman, 22, who thinks of himself as a nonentity, and hungers for simplicity in a sophisticated world—”he wanted to love a sixteen-year-old girl who didn’t know what a Lesbian was.” Most of these people, like the girl who hangs herself before the reader has a chance to know her, seem to be inviting some private disaster to overtake their own lack of purpose.

People outside madhouses should not throw stones, Author Gutwillig seems to be saying; the people inside are to be pitied, but their intelligence is by no means to be despised because they have given up the unequal struggle for reality. The trouble, as well as the uneasy appeal of Gutwillig’s subject matter, is that mad people, while fascinating to themselves, are not necessarily more interesting than the sane—only less predictable.