Slave Trade by Herbert Gold. Arbor House. 1979. 215pp. $8.95.

Author. Herbert Gold was born and raised in Lakewood, Ohio, where his early works take place: novels Birth of a Hero, The Prospect Before Us, Salt, Fathers, and his memoirs My Last Two Thousand Years. He is a former Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Ford Foundation fellow and lecturer at Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, and the University of California. His recent novels, Swiftie the Magician and Waiting for Cordelia, survey the cultural milieu of his present San Francisco home.

In the course of this new novel, Herbert Gold has his anti-heroic detective select a vehicle for a cross-country escape into involvement. He chooses an aging 1967 Ford convertible just loaded with rust and a V-8 engine that's still full of power and speed. It's a good metaphor for the book. The novel is rough edged and loosely hung together, yet it is full of Gold's solid wit and insight as he symbolically surveys the contemporary scene through the eyes of a down-and-out private eye, Sid Kasdan.

Characteristic of Gold's best fiction, it is the rich character narration that carries the book's charm and impact. Sid Kasdan's self-characterization begins in his San Francisco Poorman's Cottage in a "real-urban slum of Chicanos and blacks and toothless beatniks and a few sixties hippies who had come back from going noplace . . . Another step; another scar." Described as a retired intelligence man and a hairy but defrocked private investigator, Sid sees himself candidly, "I looked and smelled to myself like a Korean veteran who was still struggling to stop being a boy." His honesty - even at being dishonest - endears him to us as round after round he admits and reveals the contemporary plight, "I tried to like what I was doing while I went about discovering what it was." He confesses, "I'd abolished morality in California, like so many others, as a way of staying young. I was making it from boyhood clear into middle age without ever taking on the duties of a man, whatever they were." Later this philosophic detective provides insight to the best approach to this whole sad and bizarre tale, "I have the impression - a work of stymied philosophy, I suppose - that my whole life has consisted of an attempt to take stock." That is precisely what Gold is doing for us here, recording and exploring how life feels today - explicating our morality by rendering our intentions. "I was somewhat sickened by the intentions of others." His detective is sure to be compared with Raymond Chandler's Marlowe, but he is a particularly apt and contemporary vehicle here.

Gold has often stalked the bizarre and symbolically American way of life as he does here in a novel of contemporary "dealings" in love, a slave trade in young Haitian male companions for greasy old men of power and wealth. His early The Man Who Was Not With It reflected the life and times through the half-drugged eyes of a carnival hipster of the 1950s, and his most recent Waiting for Cordelia portrayed a tough-minded San Francisco prostitute through the research of a professor of sociology. His angle may be oblique, but Gold's target is always on center - the way life is and our struggle to live it with at least a small amount of courage and integrity. Through Sid Kasdan's progressive involvement and reaction to this current marketing of love we are led to explore the many realities of dream, fantasy, memory, obsession, and morality that comprise our particularly modern world. Gold is still the accurate social and psychological observer who exposes the philosophical truths at the nerve ends of experience. "Courage is hard to find outside now; it's hard to find inside too." He tells us, "I wished to travel: dreams. I wished to destroy my deathly calm: anxiety. This road I followed was a way to a happy suicide." The character Mahmoud, one of the chief symbols of corruption is rendered simply: "He had no afterthoughts." Through the eyes of his confused and non-judgmental first person narration, Gold depicts the conscience and consciousness of our times. In fact, Gold's own photograph on the book's dustjacket seems to haunt the reader with its sense of authentic struggle.

There are no flags of hope in this basically existential world, but there are paths to authenticity. These rules, which comprise the book's central code on life, are presented in the opening epigraph from DOV BAER. In complicity with life's corruption - we are all anti-heroes now - we must follow the code of the thief: "Learn (1) work at night, (2) try again the next night, (3) love your fellow-thieves, (4) risk your life even for a small thing, (5) don't attach to much value to things just because you risk your life for them, (6) withstand all beatings and trouble but remain what you are, and (7) believe what you are doing is worthwhile, insist on it." Through courage, integrity, and wit we work out our lives.

The autobiographic elements are very indirect in this novel. The settings of San Francisco, Paris, Haiti, and middle America are quite familiar to Gold and expertly characterized through impressionistic detailing. It is the central character's struggle with divorce, however, that is perhaps closest to Gold's own heart after his recent second divorce. The universal yet personal paralysis of divorce is rendered brilliantly throughout the novel. "Nothing was as good as it used to be . . . . Our world is filled with natural causes just waiting to explode." Sid Kasdan's struggle to begin again is carried to the last line of the novel, "'Are we ready to move?' I asked."

Despite some flat characterizations and the somewhat pasted-together feel of the plot, the book is an important exploration of the times by a solid and penetrating writer. His engine is full of pep, and it demands to be driven.

Reviewer: Larry R. Smith is Assistant Professor of English at Firelands College of Bowling Green State University, where he teaches creative writing and literature. His book Kenneth Patchen, on the Ohio writer and artist, was published by Twayne Publishers in 1978. He has written previous articles for Ohioana Quarterly.