Michael Crichton: Erich Segal Spelt Backwards? Take the Money and Run Dealing

222 pp. $5.95.

HERE IT IS: the book to illustrate the pictures in Life magazine. You remember those pictures: dormitory rooms sprinkled with brown-haired boys in crewneck sweaters and blue-eyed blondes stamped with ennui, their languid bodies frozen in glossy color, their fingers fading off into wisps of smoke. And you remember Life, the magazine which did for dope what the New York Times did for Charles Reich. But perhaps you weren't satisfied by Life. Or Look. Or Time or Newsweek or the Reader's Digest. Perhaps you want more.

Well, get ready; here it is. Many new books are opportunistic. Many are cheap. Quite a few are offensive; lots of others are trite. Many are cute, or misleading, or just plain boring. But Dealing, by Douglas and Michael Crichton, goes one step further. Dealing is all of these things-and more.

WHEN I was in high school, my English class read a story called "They Grind Exceeding Small." A very moralistic story, it was a diatribe against a nasty rich man who refused to lend a woman the money that would have saved her husband's life. Ironically (but, we are told, not accidentally), his own son dies as a result. It was all fairly complicated, and not very good, most of us thought. But it was assigned for a purpose. As our teacher pointed out, while the bad man in the story was pretty bad, he couldn't compare in evil to the self-righteous narrator. And so we learned that the narrator in a work of fiction is a character to be judged, like all the others.

The narrator in "They Grind Exceeding Small" was delightful compared to Peter Harkness, the narrator of Dealing. Of all the one-dimensional men to creep onto the written page, Harkness must be leader of the pack. Peter Harkness, rich New England Harvard freak. A freak in J. Press clothing. His likes: dope, cigarettes, dope, "TWA stewies," dope, pubic hair. His dislikes: pigs, his parents, pigs, the mornings before exams, pigs, the Porcellian Club, pigs, pigs. The stoned vs. the straight, the freak vs. the pig-that is his Manichean worldview. And so we follow Peter Harkness from Boston to Berkeley, his suitcase crammed with grass, his mind constantly finding newer and better ways to elude the pigs, beat plastic, uptight America, take the money and run.

At least that's what seems to be happening. You can't really be sure because Harkness speaks in what is meant to pass for hip street talk. Maybe Brother Michael wrote the plot outline and Brother Douglas translated it. At any rate, the writing in Dealing seems unrelated to anything spoken in real life. Consider:

I'd just be setting myself up for a rip-off if I ever got into any kind of hassle with the dude. Because if I got into a hassle, I'd still be a person, but he'd have to be a pig. It'd happened to me so many times, that whole riff.

Does Harkness ever become "a person?" No, but he comes closer to it than anyone else in Dealing. For the Crichtons don't bother to explore the real contours of the subculture. Which is too bad, because some of the people who live there merit attention. Unlike ghetto hard-drug pushers, college dealers are generally amateurs, or at most, semi-professionals. Some have sold their futures to the drugs they sell. But most go on living their ordinary lives, with cute incidental touches. Like the preppie dealers who boast they can tell you where the weed comes from after one taste of a joint. Or the jocks who carry long tubes as pipes, putting a given amount of hash in at one end and seeing who can use it up in a single drag.

BUT the characters in Dealing are cutouts from Time and Life. Like the magazines, they are slick, phony, packaged. So is the book. And the book is also dangerous, because the Crichtons have added hip sociology to the recipe. For example:

1. Police are pigs. They are sadistic, corrupt, envious and acne-scarred.

2. Marijuana stimulates antiwar sentiments.

3. "Nobody had ever really figured out what four years of high school did to a reasonably healthy mind."

4. Parents are not interested in understanding their children.

5. The FBI is not interested in fighting the Mafia. It would rather bust upper-middle-class dope dealers.

6. "I could never seem to get what I wanted. Nobody in America could, unless of course you happened to want something that you could purchase, in which case you had an immense variety of guaranteed satisfaction."

7. The "Oakland heat" have a habit of shooting first and asking questions later.

8. In Berkeley, demonstrators wear helmets, because "anyone who exercised the right to assemble and petition in this town knew what to expect."

9. "The campus revolt began in Berkeley . . . because the people who are striking and picketing are picking up their energy from the land."

10. The people have no power. They should have all of it.

All very glib, all true to widely varying extents, all very "now" things to say. All offensive, especially in their slick matrix, but not particularly pernicious. Unfortunately, Harkness shares other insights that are far more insidious. For instance, he criticizes "a fervent Marxist-Leninist" acquaintance: "We figured that any changes that were really going to happen were going to happen in people's heads . . . . So we blew our dope and stayed in our heads . . . . " Yet, describing the transformation of his friends and himself from straight to freak, Harkness includes the stage when "your parents [see] a picture of you in the papers with long hair, hanging out of the occupied administration building." The hopped-up hippies taking over buildings. From where else but Life could these people come?

For people pushing to legalize dope- Dealing's dedication reads, "To the lawmakers of our great land: Play This Book LOUD" -the Crichtons are not very convincing. Their freaks are as contemptible as their pigs. And when Harkness, driving stoned, nearly wrecks his car, one wonders which side this book's on. Is it all a put-on? Most reviewers, like the one in the New York Times, thought the book was a plea to abolish anti-marijuana laws. But Peter Harkness, like the narrator of "They Grind Exceeding Small," antagonizes more than he convinces. The message of the book is not clear. What is clear is that every letter in Dealing is superimposed on a dollar sign. Like Crichton's other two efforts, this book is designed for one overriding purpose: to make money.

What can you say about a book like Dealing? Only that it should have died before being born. Like certain other recent books, it has its eye on the cash appeal of Ivy League glamor and a "where it's happening" subject. But it is more wearisome and dangerous than most. For Dealing has all the subtlety and compassion of a spray-painted slogan, without a concomitant clarity of purpose.