THE SKI PEOPLE

Seeping perversions in slaloms-ville, with just enough talent (a first novel) and variety in the sideshow to keep the symbols tinkling. Othmar, a ski instructor at a New England ski resort, while not a former Nazi, has a past of ruined girls (one dead, on a pile of slaughtered Nazi prisoners; another, his sister, the ""victim"" of his childhood sexual curiosity and later of Allied bombs). With the instinctive appreciation of the curative properties of sexuality, frigid Felicia Jewish and divorced--has an affair with Othmar. But there are many other crippled psyches here; frustrated earth-mother Vivian, with her tiny child-sage husband; Betsy with her idiot son who eats glass; Neanderthal Russell and Fernie, his precocious child-sister. Together they manage to drive Felicia to a sanitarium and Othmar to the ""accidental"" murder of Russell, a ski competitor. . . . Perhaps an overuse of parallels as well as symbols among the freaks (count 'em one idiot, one child, one dry-voiced gnome, etc.) weakens this mod, mod mountain.