From the Shelf Nog

Pocket Books, 167 pages, $0.95.

IN THE last several years there has been a great proliferation of interest in alteration of consciousness. The attention that first focused on mind-altering drugs has grown to encompass sensitivity groups and other nonchemical alterations of perspective. The assumptions of these approaches and styles usually included a rejection of verbal modes.

Rudolph Wurlitzer proves in Nog that the creation of a mind-altering experience need not entail abandonment of conventional verbal expression. He has written a book, a linear book with no non-linear tricks, a book that Gutenberg would recognize as a book, that takes as powerful control over the reader as any of the other approaches people have rediscovered or invented.

In most good traditional novels, one identifies with the characters and, in a sense, enters their lives. In Nog, there is only one character, and the reader's identification is so complete that the two minds-reader's and character's-virtually become one. The book's outlook-for the character is the book-is not an outlook that you rationally recognize and file away. It is a type of perception that you necessarily adopt. And while stories built around gimmicks, Nog's effect lasts after the first reading.

In his expansion of the novel's meaning, Wurlitzer resembles Thomas Pynchon, who also wrote a book in which the reader adopts the protagonist's emotion instead of merely sympathizing with it. In The Crying of Lot 49, the plot contains a possible conspiracy that you see as a possible conspiracy existing in your life in exactly the same sense as it exists in the novel. The intellectualized emotions contained within the book are generalized outside of it in a way that does not usually happen.

It happened to an even greater degree in Nog, for in Nog, there are not even characters. There is instead the one mind of the book, and the one world of that mind.

THE BOOK is incredibly tight. The flow of words is inevitable. A measure of the quality of the writing is that it is totally unobtrusive and unnoticed except in the two or three spots where a word sounds gratingly out of place. Then you know how perfectly placed everything else must be.

I'm not going to presume to attribute didactic intentions to Wurlitzer, to try to fathom whether he intended his book as a polemic, and if he did, what he sympathizes with. But the vision that he does present is extremely depersonalized. The mind you take on in the book's realm is floating in a null-space where any more than three memories are superfluous, and even that many is suspect. Memories are toys to be played with. It is like seeing Fantasia as a child and not being sure for years whether you actually saw those images or only dreamed that you saw them, with the difference that here you don't care.

Everything outside of the self is in the unstable world governed by memories, and almost all of the self, even to some extent its basic physical activities, finds its way to the shadow-world, too. Thus life and death become irrelevant, "friend" is a meaningless term, and "will" is undefinable. In fact, Nog is just one are of the character's circular journey through nowhere.

He cannot direct the trip:

"I've spent most of my time in an endless search to find light and get away from light. If I could only be sure of that, that nothing happened. It would summon something, a continuity perhaps, a shout anyway; no, I don't have the energy to get carried away. I am being carried away. I need something steadier, an endless stare. The wall of rock is flat. Nog is closer, his eyes cruel and distant."

But the Nog is only a memory-or an are. And he is finally not there at all, leaving us with a lyric vision of an ugly emptiness.