Clever to a Fault

NATIVE INTELLIGENCE came out last year amid little fanfare, unheralded and unnoticed, which, while not a major tragedy, is still too bad, particularly around here. Raymond Sokolov's first novel is in large measure about Harvard and its mentality in the early days of the Kennedy meritocracy, as seen through various purported documents pertaining to the career of Alan Casper '63, linguistics genius and Peace Corps soldier of fortune. Casper is very clever and very witty and not very deep, and Sokolov presents his case accordingly; Native Intelligence, then, is of vast prurient interest to Harvard students and, like its hero, a little too smart for its own good.

The novel begins with Alan Casper's Harvard application essay, written from Flint, Michigan, in which he says he expects Harvard to be "the place to which Western culture leads us, men and women nourished by their civilization, sophisticated in life, experienced, witty and at home with their own lust." By the time Alan graduates, he seems to have made great personal strides toward that ideal, having compiled the best academic record at Harvard since 1937, learned 497 foreign languages, and found true and passionate love in the Widener D-level stacks, among other places. Thus equipped, he decides not to go to grad school and joins the Peace Corps, hoping to learn some new languages and help those less fortunate.

He ends up, after several bureaucratic shufflings, in the little-known Latin American province of Qatab, where the CIA keeps an eye on him and he, in turn, ventures out among the untamed Xixi people to keep an eye on them for the CIA and make sure no one tampers with their uranium deposits. His story--told through entries in his journal, letters to and from his girlfriend at Harvard Summer School, and the government's spying reports on him--takes on endless complications as he gets deeper and deeper into Xixi culture and trouble.

The point is that for all his intelligence Alan is very much a young innocent, and it becomes increasingly clear to him that what he is doing in the Peace Corps makes no sense on any level. He came to Qatab to work for peace, and finds himself in the employ of the CIA, which has photographs of him in various compromising positions and can black-mail him into anything. Beyond the cruder forms of imperialism in which he finds himself inexorably involved, though, there is an imperialism of a more basic sort as well. Alan has always assumed that learning and modernity are good things, and his most straight-forward and untainted Peace Corps sort of mission is to spread them to less advanced people like the Xixi. The tribe seems to be ripe for this kind of thing--it spends its time in meaningless rituals, many of them involving animal dung, and suffers from high disease rates. But the Xixi are also happy, and they resist all of Alan's attempts to civilize them; indeed, their ultimate destruction is due not to any inherent flaw in their ridiculous way of living but to the encroachment of Western powers.

Alan, realizing all this, becomes less and less sure that he should be reforming the Xixi, and more and more drawn into their tribal rites. From the beginning, since he is in their village, they regard him as a young member of the tribe; and as Alan's ability to rationalize his supposed role there diminishes, he comes to accept this interpretation too, going through marriage and initiation into the tribe. Americanizing the Xixi is an impossible task, and learning their language is not a thing that can be done with the Widener Library detachment to which Alan is accustomed; language in this instance implies more than just definitions, and its "deep structure" has to do with patterns of culture as well as just syntax.

ALL THIS is not as straightforward and moralistic as it sounds, mostly because Sokolov spends so much energy--maybe too much energy--being witty, in increasingly abstruse ways. At first, the humor of Native Intelligence is a sharp and satirical joy. Sokolov, like his hero Harvard '63, summa cum laude, understands exactly the kind of mind he is writing about, and he portrays intelligence intelligently and with unerring accuracy. All of Alan's foibles--his detachment, his slight scorn for everyone else, his obsessive discovery of sex, in the way he dresses--ring absolutely true. His, and Sokolov's, mind is at bottom unceasingly observant and perceptive, interested in and a little bored by everything, endlessly analytical of self and surroundings. Because of this, the way the novel is presented in the form of widely varied bits and scraps of experience and expression fits well; roving and restless minds, after all, lack consistency and matured, unified vision.

So as a way to portray Alan Casper, Native Intelligence is fine; it is as a real novel that it is hampered by its own wit and restless eclecticism. The materials in the novel run a bizarre gamut from an incredibly difficult crossword puzzle (Sokolov offers to send readers the solution, for a dollar), to a lengthy glossary of the Xixi language, to purported New York Times clippings, to a threatening letter Alan writes President Kennedy. The feeling emerges from it all that Sokolov is playing myriad obscure jokes throughout, that some second satiric meaning lurks behind everything. Is the Xixi language full of esoteric puns? Why are the words for flirt and pregnant almost exactly the same? Is there any meaning at all to the patently nonsensical Xixi legends? Is the Xixi village--divided east-west by a river, north-south by an imaginary line--supposed to be an allegorical version of the United States? What exactly does Sokolov mean by ending with a long quote from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Hiawatha? It is impossible to say; but it is certain that Sokolov is smarter than he is deep, and that he has hinted many times at the presence in his narrative of more meaning than is actually there.

Alan's final, crazed musings, spoken at a time when he is an official Xixi tribesman, are about art, music, culture, myth and their relationship to the Xixi, and the quiche at Chez Jean. His experiences in the Qatab jungles have changed him and skewed his thinking, but he is still only six months out of Harvard and his dream appears to be bringing his Xixi wife back to grad school in Cambridge with him. Although most of Native Intelligence takes place in Latin America it is really mostly about Harvard; its point has to do with setting forth a particular kind of mind, one endemic to Cambridge, and then observing its behavior in a wildly different setting. What emerges--partly because of the novel's strengths, and partly because of its weaknesses--is a clear exposition of the problems inherent in departing, from "the place to which Western culture leads us," to better serve, as they say, thy country and thy kind.