SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY

After the Nightmare of the Dark (1967) of Dachau, what next -- obviously our own Jane ParkerHoward Johnson culture which frames and is intended to give some larger meaning to ex-CIA Silberstang's rabid story. Indiscriminately applied obscenity and violence litter the landscape just as surely as do those pool and pizza parlors. This takes place a few years from now when another president has succeeded the ""glut-eyed"" Nixon -- Silberstang writes badly whatever the occasion. The president's daughter Priscilla (""Prissy ella"") is snatched on the night that his wife dies of cancer. She's in the bloodstained (he had earlier carved up a black fag) hands of one Dean Stillman who with four others had bombed an oil company. They now take her to Woodstock for the rendezvous. . . not with the lover she anticipated. All of this is so dilated and discolored that the reader whose nose has been rubbed in every kind of filth will be left to wash his hands of it -- wondering with a certain justification whether Silberstang's book proceeds from indignation or just the desire to shock.