THE DO-GOODERS

This is an extension of Marie Beginning (1965)--again kooky people and kinky deviations, in a limbo which seems halfway between black comedy and slack parody. Marie, 21, widowed (assumed by Kennan with whom she is living to have killed her husband) and fantastically rich, decides to divert her real assets and questionable talents into various philanthropic pursuits: a retaliatory action via three lice-infested prostitutes: a political rowdydow in Harlem; and when last seen the dynamiting of a new highway. Mr. Goodman is of course commenting on some of the uglier aspects of American life today and certainly he manages to particularize it with all the more distasteful modernisms in both word and deed. But as Marie's Mafioso lover says ""fun isn't everything I mean unless you want it to be"" and you'd have to want awfully hard to find the fun in all these brassy, pop-plop irregularities.