THE MAMA TASS MANIFESTO.

ByRoger L. Simon '65. New York: Holt,Rinehart and Winston, 1970. 164 pp. $4.95.

Roger Simon’s second novel offers something for almost anyone well established or under thirty. Its lack of focus, pastiche of headlines, slogans and catchwords attempting to substitute for plot and character delineation, and its fairly shabby premises for significant satire may disturb levelheaded critics. Youthful readers, nevertheless, may discover more that is meaningful in the sometimes acute black comedy.

The Mama Tass Manifesto also contains several hilarious, well-realized, and painstakingly succinct scenes within the cosmic, quasi-Marxist potpourri of its design. We encounter a proliferation of youthful revolutionary phenomena in the book’s brief, meandering saga. Tanya Gesner’s progress towards the legndary “Mama Tass,” codirector with her husband and Scarsdale High School sweetheart, Morrie of the “Guerrila Puppets for Freedom,” emancipates her from her painful beginnings on the wrong side of the tracks in Westchester County.

Morrie Gesner, son of a famous, fat-cat Harvard Medical School neurosurgeon, meets Tanya during freshman week at Columbia-Barnard. He is so despairing at not being admitted to Harvard that his already proven insurgency becomes adamant. Together they develop their guerrilla Bun-raku show with puppets highly offensive to elderly D.A.R. ladies, college deans, and Manhattan hard-hats because they deride America’s peerless leaders and expose robust phalluses. ,

Their climactic confrontation with imperi- alist and hypocritical free enterprise involves the $ 11-million detonation of an off-shore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

The style is florid and varies in color from pink to red, from yellowish green to purplish black. The symbolism is catchy, sporadic, uncontrolled; the plot line, disjointed and dismembered. Real satire requires dis- ciplined thought, a steady hand, and, above all, ethical conviction. The novel offers a contemporary living theatre based on John Keats’s notion of “negative capability.” Simon reaches for, but never attains, what Keats aspired to: a state of mind “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mys- teries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Now completing his doctorate at BostonUniversity, Mr. White has taught literatureand creative writing at Rutgers Universityand Bates College.