How to Beat the System: The Fiftieth, Last, and True Success Book of Lionel Goldfish

What begins as a lampoon of how-to-succeed books soon collapses into chaos as the protagonist, Rene BenetHarvard '54, ""37 going on 18''chucks everything one day in 1969, leaves his rich wife and a teaching job (at Ulysses S. Grant University, where the student body is so cretinous that ``even the Jewish students are dumb'') to barrel off in the company of a funky hitchhiker to the landmark rock concert in Woodstock, and then on to a commune in Cambridge. He ``beats the System'' by simply rejecting it: marriage and divorce, career and the ``work ethic,'' scholarships and the academic world, culture and counterculture, militant feminists and their benighted opponents, think tanks and corporate R & Din short, every characteristic of the way we live now. Eventually, he is saved from the ruinous clutches of a hustler, charlatan and bogus gururedeemed by the love of a good woman and by honest work. The trouble is that these targets of farce and satire have already been flogged to death. And some potentially boisterous episodes that might have worked as rambunctious, outrageous humor are stretched beyond their natural limits by a talented farceur who doesn't always know when to leave well enough alone. (December 1)