In the War for Peace

The self-styled student radicals in Hetzner's uneven debut novel about the 1960s counterculture-college classmates who share a communal home in Indiana-are so self-righteous and arrogant, so blinded by their idealism, that readers may find it difficult to care much about their revolutionary dreams or romantic lives. Angered by deepening U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, 300-pound amphetamine-addicted, paranoid stutterer and girlfriend-beater Gordon Wainsell and his LSD-popping, dope-taking, drug-dealing buddies burglarize and trash the offices of pro-war professors, fire-bomb a university building and accidentally kill two people by bombing a chemical plant that produces napalm. One comrade, acid-head and speed-freak Dewitt Berkoff, splits for New Haven, Conn., with an alias, then crashes in New York's East Village with hippie cosmic artist Ova Gardener and her boyfriend, Frodo. Newspaper headlines prefacing each chapter (""Nixon Restarts North Bombing,"" ""Jackie Weds Onassis,"" etc.) give heavy-handed context to the tale. The novel's leitmotif, ""Is War Inevitable?""-the theme of an essay assignment, sporadically debated by sundry characters-seems oddly disconnected from the action. There are many sex scenes, but the female characters are given short shrift and only fleeting attention (much as, in real life, women were slighted by the strutting male leads of the counterculture). Still, as an unflinching plunge into the seamy underbelly of the 1960s far-left fringe, Hetzner's gritty novel succeeds in unmasking of the era's rhetorical poses and more glaring hypocrisies. But Philip Roth does it better in American Pastoral (see below). (Apr.)