Books: Decline & Fall of Metaphor

THE WHISTLING ZONE by Herbert Kubly. 348 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.95.

The author of a prizewinning travel book, An American in Italy, has come home to write a satire about America. So much contact with Roman antiquities has convinced Herbert Kubly that America is also ripe for a fall. The yahoos have taken over, free speech is stifled, the kids are sex-mad. It is an “informers’ land,” says one character who is supposed to speak the plain, unvarnished truth. “We’re a species of children, rather nasty children, tattling on one another, playing with our toys of microphones and wire taps.”

The poor hero is that stock figure, the liberal martyr, and the locale that stock setting, a Midwestern college campus. He cannot even say that “Karl Marx was the most important man of the century” without being sacked. (He should have been fired for puerility, not subversion.) This humanist hails from New England, but his behavior is strictly late Roman. He weeps a lot, likes to fiddle with flower arrangements, takes barbiturates, has a penchant for sharing his quarters with other delicate young men. Occasionally he reproaches himself in lush metaphor. “You talk like a gelded pedagogue who has never felt the blood of manhood throbbing like red Chianti in his veins.”

As for superspectacular sexual fantasies, Kubly is hard to beat. He presents an underwater coupling, a 30-ft.-high phallic symbol, a necrophilic stripper, a mass rape of a midget. It’s almost enough to bring heterosexuality into disrepute.