Down and in: Life in the Underground

When Sukenick, a middle-class kid from Brooklyn, plunged into Greenwich Village bohemia in the early 1950s, Dylan Thomas was still ""in.'' This atmospheric memoir recalls just about every hip topic or crazeWilhelm Reich, ``selling out,'' the vogue for shoplifting, Beat verse, punk rockas it meanders through bars, cafes, lofts, parties and crash-pads. Novelist and critic Sukenick stitches together anecdotes and interviews with Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Judith Malina, Tuli Kupferberg, Amiri Baraka and dozens more. He tracks the doings of artists, floaters, freaks, poets, hippies and hustlers as the cultural explosion of the '60s gives way to an underground scene that became compartmentalized, co-opted or confused. The book offers choice gossip but remains too close to its subject to provide much perspective on the Greenwich Village subculture. (September 18)