EAGLE IN THE AIR

When first met, Jennie, the Negro heroine, is under siege at a Chicago university while practicing the politics of confrontation; she subsequently is expelled and her boyfriend takes her in. They live together until he degenerates into a beer-drinking bum forcing Jennie to exit via the nearest drain pipe. Then she goes to her sister's but her sister is in the middle of a nervous breakdown and bounces Jennie out of the house in a jealous fit. Jennie decides to hitchhike to California and, a series of sleazy adventures later, we find her falling in love with a gentle one-armed giant called Johnny who is heading west with a noxious adolescent known as ""the Kid."" Miss Robinson, a first novelist, has some good characterization and a talent for dialect and dialogue. Qualities that she may put to better use in a second novel that does not read like a rough draft for the Perils of Pauline.