NOWHERE by Thomas Berger (Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence: $14.95)....

NOWHERE by Thomas Berger (Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence: $14.95). Thomas Berger’s title is a play on Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon,” one of the liveliest and best of the anti-Utopian novels. They devise an alternative world, usually--as with Swift, Huxley, Orwell and Butler himself--in order to parody ours or to warn of the way it’s going. “Erewhon” was nowhere written backwards. “Nowhere” is “Erewhon” backwards, and Berger’s novel, in truth, is rather a retrograde product for this gifted and original writer. Its narrator is Wren, an unsuccessful private investigator who finds himself on a mission to the central European principality of San Sebastian. Part Ruritania and part Albania, it is governed by an immensely fat prince whose main occupation is eating. San Sebastian is an anthill of incongruities. It is a tyranny, yet the police cower when anyone talks back to them and put themselves in stocks if accused of being rude. No bill is ever paid so as not to undermine the national debt system. Churches and schools have been abolished; children spend the entire day watching old movies. The underclass, despised and forced to do all the menial work, consists of blue-eyed blonds. A blond uprising deposes the prince and sets up a government that seems likely to resemble the one that it has overthrown. Berger’s anti-Utopia has a spark or two of recognizable parody--blonds in the role of blacks or Hispanics, for example--but it’s done without any real conviction or even much wit. Anti-Utopia’s move by faith. Even “Alice in Wonderland’s” feverish meanderings had a specific thrust. “Nowhere” barely drifts.