Books Windsong

275 pages: $5.95

IS THERE any place to go but up? I don't think so. It seems to me that we are all sitting around reading our books, having our orgasms, taking our drugs, and praying our prayers for that reason only. To go up. To rise above these wretched buildings, institutions and all around bric-a-brac. Call it freedom, call it transcendence, call it mind-blowing, call it rebirth, call it death-it couldn't happen too soon to any of us.

Windsong, senior Nicholas Gagarin's first novel, is about this yearning to go up. It tells the story of three boys' attempts to get there: Hal, who tries to go up through his love for a girl named Flo: a character referred to only as "the boy," who attempts to get aloft with the help of Esalen, the California sensitivity institute; and Gagarin himself, who interrupts the narrative occasionally to tell of his attempts to find salvation through his perception and interpretation of the liberation of Harvard last spring. None of the characters quite gets there-but then again, how many people do you know who have made it?

Only "the boy" comes close to getting up. It is near the end of his stay at Esalen, and he receives a massage from a beautiful girl who works there. As she lovingly rubs his body, he trips out in feelings of ego-less love. One hopes (and suspects) that he will pass that way again.

Gagarin, who for a while occupied University Hall and later wholeheartedly participated in the strike, also finds a form of "up" as a result of his experience. In an essay about midway through the book, he pictures a structureless university-a school where all the tradition-honored rigamarole that someone decided was "education" a thousand years ago or so would vanish. This, too, is a kind of "up"-although if we were to really get up there, school itself would become a meaningless item-and Gagarin's explanation of educational ecstasy is as good as any I've seen. If you can't yet figure out what that's about, you should read what he has to say quick.

But then there is Hal. It is his story that occupies most of Windsong's pages and therefore his story that we are most interested in. Sadly, it is also his story that is the least interesting of the three.

HAL IS A rich kid. He has parents who can send him to St. Paul's to prep, to Harvard, to Austria every Christmas to ski in the Alps. He is witty, he is bright, he is good looking, he is strong. But he has a problem: he loves Flo and she will not reciprocate.

There are several problems with this major part of the book-but the main one is simple: Hal isn't much. He isn't much, because there seems no reason for his love for Flo other than the reason that she would be another beautiful object to possess. From Hal's vantage point, we get the impression that what interests him about her are her clothes (They are described in detail every time she appears), her beautiful auburn hair, and the fact that she can't be had. He may love her for other reasons-but they aren't really in the book. After a while, I grew to detest Hal; and I certainly didn't give a shit what happened to him.

What is left is a kind of sour Love Story. Or a Graduate that leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth. Hal is no Dustin Hoffman, to be sure. He dumps cruelly on two girls who love him (Susan in Zurs and Emily in New York). His thoughts are too often too rich and too banal. (Experiences are frequently described as "nice" and "good.") He develops a minor drinking problem and it becomes a self-conscious preppie debauch.

An unlikeable character such as Hal certainly could work in a book, but only if the narrator has some distance on him and realizes his absurdity. Gagarin-as we know from the superior Esalen and Harvard portions of the book-has seen "up." Why couldn't he write about Hal from up there?

Instead, the author gets sucked down to' Hal's earth level. Hal's reality becomes the only reality of his narrative, and the novel gets lost in the details of a pursuit that means nothing to us. It is too humorless and too straight in the writing.

Near the book's end, Hal thinks, "Maybe it's possible to go up and never come down, to stay up, to be always up, to be always stoned." As we and Gagarin know, that's the whole ballgame. But how did Hal find that out? The only answer is that he, like us, has read the other parts of the book. But that's cheating, and this novel, which aims very high, suffers severely as a result.