Books Riot Nights

Random House, 191 pp., $5.95

MOST HISTORICAL novels have the benefit of several years. even centuries of accounts, historical revisions and second-guessing to clarify the vision of their object. Riot Nights, by recent Harvard graduate Ron Innis, is a provocative but flawed first novel, victimized by its proximity to its subject matter. It is difficult not to imagine that Innis has also been victimized by salivating New York publishers intent on capitalizing, in accordance with the current trend, on a premature and giddy Ivy League talent.

This novel, it turns out, was actually four years in the making. Begun as a project for expository writing on "Why I Came To Harvard," it soon emerged as a more expansive account of Innis' four years at this school. However, far from being just another embellished journal, the work, by sophomore year, had become a revealing description of the tenor of undergraduate life. Innis' peculiarly idiosyncratic career (he attended Exeter and came to Harvard, joined the CRIMSON, majored in Soc Rel, and spent his summers as a Newsweek correspondent while also teaching black ghetto children, allows him to achieve a distance from the insulated condition of Cambridge life. Saved from our prevailing myopia, Innis looks back on his years here with startling equanimity.

As the novel (clearly autobiographical, though unnecessary pains are taken to conceal the most obvious identities) opens, Randy Harris, the main character, finds himself in an encounter group, during which he is required to undress. Randy, childhood victim of an uncle who once exclaimed "Got your nose" and unmercifully tore it from his face, is forced to deal with his uncovered rig as well as his intimidating appearance. In one of the most brutal moments of contemporary fiction, Randy comes to understand both his vulnerability as well as a higher reality which is blind to physical difference.

By its second chapter, it becomes apparent that the book works on both a symbolical-fantasy level and a representational one, a tension that recalls the effects of Jerzy Kozinski's vignettes in Steps. In what appears to be part of his "real world," Randy is absorbed momentarily by Progressive Labor, adopts a stringent Marxist line and announces that "whoever isn't a Marxist eats shit." The infusion of colloquial language lends a very real resonance to the book. Randy, finding the first few pages of Capital almost incomprehensible, suddenly becomes a coprophiliac. At this point, Author Innis begins to pull even this reality out from under the feet of his readers. Randy begins to confuse painters' helpers with Santa helpers, the NLF with NEE, and even his CRIMSON pieces soon reflect his bewilderment at world events. In short, Randy is shaken out of his Eastern mold and recast as an alienated intellectual, writing on one essay into personal journalism during his junior year, "I am lost. And words are useless. The pieces no longer fit together."

RIOT NIGHTS, however, more than compensates for its laxity of prose and technical inconsistencies, with an epigrammatic finesse that captures better than any Harvard novel to date, college schizophrenia and numinous existentias despair. Although Innis too often is guilty of facile, canned prose, he comes up with some beauties. For example, Randy on the verge of graduation, muses that "Neil Young's tidy answers are not enough."

His perspective gained, his virginity lost. Randy struggles toward his diffident future. In an incident which is located somewhere between the two realities, somewhere between pathos and burlesque, Randy loses a foot to an errant truck on an unplowed Cambridge street. Burdened by further physical disability as well as the now familiar psychic pangs, he becomes an allegorical victim of the technological age. But he remains in touch with his now tenanted identity by cultivating new interests in candlemaking and pottery. Upon graduation Randy returns to his family home in Ipswich, Massachusetts and finds the world he once knew in a state of dissollusion. In a particularly moving scene he finds on the living room table a copy of Reich's Greening of America, and there alone, in the midst of unaccountable pain he finally understands that he is a part of Consciousness III. Committed to that category, he accepts the invitation of some old school friends and moves to an abandoned ski resort in Vermont-where Innis ends the novel with a primal scream, at once cathartic and empty.

For many the book may touch too close to home. Living in our tiny rooms, by turns smoking dope, listening to Dylan, and sleeping, it's all too easy to understand Randy's maze of confusion. Caught swirling in a world out of control, Randy's last scream echoes our own pointless protests. We may have had enough of this replay of our own lives, especially now when we have a sense of the beginning and the end of what was once full of buoyant hope. I just don't know anymore. You have to think in the end tha this book is like a Chinese meal; a half hour after. . . .