Romanticism Cubed

By ROBERT HUGHES

THE PAINTER GABRIEL by Donald Newlove. 313 pages. McCall. $6.95.

Nether sections of Avenue B provide the Boschian landscape of Hell. They swarm with dreadful objects: flaking $65 walk-ups and urine-stained corridors, a cat skinned live in the alley, bums and glue-sniffing Puerto Rican delinquents, burst trash bags and rusty fire escapes. All these things, lit by the glare of burning cars and the flash of pot or amphetamine, are the backdrop to one of the best fictional studies of madness, descent and purification that any American has written since Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Donald Newlove clearly set out to write a first novel about demoniac society. He has produced a combined morality play and grimoire, or devil's hornbook, in which every creature is experienced with hilarious or dreadful concreteness.

Gabriel the painter is its central character, a loquacious and unrecognized artist who buys time to paint his apocalyptic visions by turning out cheap still lifes of Chianti bottles to order for a downtown trash shop. He is the stoned descendant of Joyce Carey's Gulley

Jimson, a prey to the same tumescent, Blakean mysticism as Jimson, and an example of the outsider used as a corrective lens through which human absurdities may be studied.

In the country of the mad, the creative loon is king. Around Gabriel cluster amiable freaks, all of whom, like him, define a precarious balance by opposing their craziness to the paranoia of the outside city. There is Walter, an amateur Polish historian, whose East Village flat is filled to the ceiling with grimy bales of newspaper, all destined to be cross-indexed and given to a university in Warsaw; Dulcie Kraft, a Texas scientologist; Beamer, a novelist writing a book about morning sickness, "privately printed and sent only to monasteries"; Orville, a pot dealer and "passing student of Eastern cosmic consciousness," and so on.

Does the list seem familiar? It is. But if Newlove applies his Instant Identifreak Kit too patly and produces some characters who are hardly more than bundles of attributes, many of his human inventions swell like bullfrogs from the sheer pressure of his linguistic vitality. Gabriel himself, with his constantly thwarted desire for transcendence and his unstoppable monologues on everything from sex to Homeric mythology, is a memorable caricature: beside him, the Beat heroes of '50s fiction look not merely anemic but ignorant. Gabriel, simply, is romanticism cubed: "Scrape your brain bare, like a battery electrode, expose your nerves like a bush of copper. Get ready to sing or die. Or maybe both! And all this out here, these roofs and smokestacks, will turn into light--and you'll see right through them--because they'll no longer be necessary to support the illusion of our lives." In its way, Newlove's muddy, inflamed picaresque novel is a remarkable performance. Even so, as his large promise develops, the author may one day need to reflect on the possibility that less is more.

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