Punch Goes' the Judy

209 pages. $5.95.

THERE HAVE been so many books about young people and the revolution, and so many of them have been so bad, that it's easy to become skeptical of anyone trying to write about the revolution in human spirit. The usual checklist of "youth culture" rhetoric-radicals, drugs, sex, "the establishment"-is so common, that it's become easy to fall into the trap of thinking that no one has anything really important or sensitive to say. It's become easy to read a jacket cover blurb like "Sonzski may be as meaningful for his generation as Salinger was for his" and, as I did, want to throw up.

But every so often a book comes along which has something dramatic to say, a book that is so moving and so alive that it makes us want to stand up and start shouting yes you're right, that's the way it is. William Sonzski's Punch Goes the Judy is that kind of book. I made it through the jacket hype, to find a novel that hit me like a punch to the solar plexus; a novel that made me laugh a lot and cry a little and most importantly, stop and think about just what it is that my life and my own personal battle is all about.

Punch Goes the Judy tells a simple story. Punch is a nineteen-year-old Vassar sophomore from a traditionally conservative, wealthy, Indianapolis home. Through her own nature and will to live, her friends, and her environment, she has seen through the shit she has been spoon-fed all her life. She has seen through the hatred of men and sex her mother has tried to instill in her since childhood, through the robbery and racism of which her family's wealth is a product, and the maxim that you don't rock the boat, even if the boat is sinking. She has seen through the parents who want to commit her to an asylum for her behavior and her ideas, and has tried desperately to escape. First, a weak attempt at suicide, and then a violently determined but agonizing retreat from the life she has known and grown up in.

Keves Bolton, her brother, is a graduate student in government at Columbia, who grew up, as he says, "a few years before the thought of changing the system from within became unthinkable." He is caught in the middle between Punch and her parents, sensitive to the horror that Punch has seen, yet still with the gut feeling that the way to solve problems is to be polite and diplomatic and bring everybody together again without rocking the boat.

Their story takes place as Punch and Keyes drive from New York toward their Indianapolis home. Punch wants desperately to run away, to escape the end of freedom she sees in going home. But Keyes is trying to take her home, "where we can work things out." "Work what out?" Punch asks, and he has nothing to say. As she gradually and fearfully unfolds to him the horror she knows and has felt so deeply, he too understands that there is no freedom in the life he has always lived, and "breaks through to the other side."

What is so moving about Punch Goes to Judy is not its political commentary: Punch's radicalism versus Keyes' questioning, sensitive but nonetheless rigid liberalism. It is not the description of the social situation they see, by now so predictably familiar. It is not even Punch's and Keyes' social commentary-descriptions of what Keyes calls the "prophylactic society," the picture of hate that confronts the two Boltons in the turnpike restaurant where they are forced to spend a snowy night, or the picture of Keyes' roommate, an Upper East Side, hairstyled, ankle-booted beautiful person who writes advertisements for Disarm Deodorant. We have heard these things before.

What is striking are the two characters that Sonzski portrays so humanly, and the love that makes them try to find each other again now that the boat has capsized.

Keyes' dilemma should be familiar, even to those who consider themselves radicals. At a certain point we are all going to have to face a moment of cusp when we will finally have to decide which side we are on, and the decision is going to be irretrievable. Keyes says, "you can ignore the truth until something blows, but when it blows you have to face up to it. Or else walk away whistling." If we aren't going to walk away whistling, we have to stand up to the decision.

Keyes is alternately cocky and confused, cynical and lonely, but most of all questioning. He is the same kind of ingenuous character that Holden Caulfield was. His love for Punch, his great longing to understand her, makes the book come alive, makes it a book about individual people instead of mere social criticism. Keyes' position-caught between two generations-is similar to Caulfield's, but where Salinger's hero of the fifties wanted to spend his life at the edge of a cliff keeping the children from going over, Keyes, a hero of the seventies, finds himself dragged over the cliff and out of the rye field into the uncertainty on the other side. Instead of stopping Punch from going over, he is dragged over with her.

Punch is less effective as a character, a weakness in the book. What we see of her, for the most part, is a silent, violently angry, incommunicative and insensitive rebel. For a long while she won't speak with Keyes, and plots to get him out of the car. Only occasionally do we see the warmth, sensitivity, and compassion that move her. These scenes, when she breaks down and cries in fear to Keyes, when she talks of her boyfriends Regis, when she describes her unspeakable fear and horror when raped at gunpoint, are the finest in the novel.

Since Punch is the moving force in the novel, the fact that she is for the most part silent and suspicious is disconcerting. We have come to expect our radicals to be militant, certainly, but polite. Here we are forced to understand the real nature of her character through Keyes' description of her as a child. He talks of the innocent wonder she once possessed, the love of life and the spirit that made her "the coolest Bolton alive," and we must rely on him, and a few occasional glimpses of this spirit and compassion, to believe in Punch. What does become clear is that somehow a wonderfully alive human being has been transformed into a bundle of hate. Keyes, the moved one, rather than Punch, the mover, is the one who tells us why.

Punch Goes to Judy is the story of personal crises and personal fears. Keyes' transformation, his gradual awakening and increasing militance, along with his constant compassion and love, makes the book a dynamic force.

This is the kind of book that we could look back on years from now to say yes, that was it, that was how we won our own battles for freedom. It is also a book we can look to now to show us that the battlefield is within ourselves, that we are the enemy, the only salvation.