THE HIGHER ANIMALS by H.E.F. Donahue. 273 pages. Viking. $4.95.
Every university, but especially a big-city one encysted in slums like Columbia or Chicago, has its strays: the ex-students, would-be writers, nostalgic journalists, misplaced faculty wives and outright intellectual bums who huddle up to the academic fire for warmth without fully belonging there. They clerk in the bookstores, talk the night away in the coffee shops, provide the steady custom for the bars.
On a warm summer night on Chicago’s South Side, half a dozen such strays congregate at Lou’s Bar near the university to celebrate the 25th birthday of their good friend, a very cool young man named Daniel Conn. A little earlier, Conn had watched a nearby house burn down. Although one of his friends tried to rescue them, three old people were killed in the fire. A little later. Conn sees two friends try to halt a shooting spree by a trio of criminals. His friends are killed. One is a woman he loves.
Whipsawed between these episodes of mindless violence on one side and the affection and good talk of his friends on the other, Conn the cool observer is driven to the edge of despair—but also to a shocked knowledge of his unavoidable engagement with the world. Donohue tells his oddly appealing, existential fable with precision of place and style, in a tone as cool as his hero. It reverberates in the mind like a slow-motion movie of a man falling from a tall building: his plight is horrifyingly real, but so is the absurdity of his flailing struggle, frozen on the film of memory.
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