DIRTY PICTURES FROM THE PROM

This wild stomp through the programmed incoherence which is youthful America (the author is nineteen and a college student and the simultaneous paperback would suggest campus camp-followers) pursues several favorite modern themes. Among them: the mystical nature of time--past, present and future repeating themselves backwards and forwards as the central participant, one Osgood Barnaby Saltzer, searches for an ""indeterminate place . . . at the end of memory lane."" Two figures beckon him at all times: namely his brother Crynaldo, a prodigious prodigy who died of leukemia at 7 but left a legacy of drawings reproduced and dialogues quoted here; and a childhood friend Jiffrey, a nice, inconspicuous minister's daughter, who committed suicide. Barney feints with their specters as he advances from disenchantment to dissolution via experiences (very sexual) with a black girl, Roberta, murder, narcotics, syphilis, and so forth. In between the author holds discussions with his editor about whatever phase he is undergoing and the editor sounds quite like a head-candler even if he does very little to clarify what is going on. Perhaps that's expecting too much of him.