BOOK REVIEWS : ‘Rummies’ Defeated by Its Own Genre

Rummies by Peter Benchley (Random House: $18.95; 251 pages.)

Bad habits can make good fiction, and Benchley’s plunge into the deep of a residential treatment center for substance abusers is more satirical, less reverent, and far wittier than most. Unfortunately, the operative words are than most, because the drying-out novel has now become virtually a genre unto itself, like war, love, and coming-of-age, though unlike these classic themes, sobering up doesn’t admit nearly so many individual variations.

If the setting is an expensive establishment in the Western desert and one’s fellow patients include a once-glamorous movie star, a major league ball player and a troubled young heiress to provide romantic interest, along with a few genuine wild cards, you’ve got a typical mix, as standard as the stereotypes that turn up in war novels. When the therapy itself is patterned on the familiar Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program, with a lot of praying, confessing, and hugging, even the most skillful writer doesn’t have much room to maneuver.

Working within these strict constraints, Benchley does manage to stretch the convention by making one of the patients a 300-pound Mafioso on scholarship from the Mob; another a criminal sentenced to the Banner Clinic by the courts; adding a flamboyantly gay but noble lush, and balancing the mix with an otherwise ordinary fellow who arrives in a Bugs Bunny costume.

The founder, Stone Banner, is a sanctimonious old fraud who opened the clinic after his brilliant career in horse opera was prematurely terminated by alcoholism. Saved from physical and financial ruin by the 12-step program, he started his own establishment, which has turned out to be a bonanza--almost as lucrative as movies, but with fewer variables. The staff, as is usual in such places, are all recovering abusers, dedicated to the principles of tough love. While some are more effective than others, the differences tend to blur.

The finest scenes come at the beginning, when the distinctly upper-class protagonist, Scott Preston, begins his day as a publisher in an acute alcoholic crisis. Like his fellow sufferers, he’s been deceiving himself for years, interpreting his shakes and sweats as “a metabolic thing,” diagnosing his horrendous hangovers as a mysterious virus, his serious mental lapses as mere oversights. Once in his office, after a harrowing commute to the city, he’s abruptly confronted by his wife, his daughter, the president of his company and the representative of the Banner Clinic, assembled to conduct “an intervention,” the encounter at which the alcoholic is forced to confront the fact and the evidence of his addiction. The session ends with Scott Preston being escorted to the plane that takes him to the clinic. On arrival, he’s met at the gate by Chuck, the Banner’s driver and general factotum, from whose implacable grip there’s no possible escape.

Aloof, hesitant and recalcitrant at first, appalled at the company, the rules, and the pervasive piety, Preston is made miserably aware that all differences of education and background vanish in the brotherhood of addiction. Alcoholism is the great leveler, and once his brain begins to clear, Preston realizes that he has more in common with these losers than with his Yale classmates, his exurbanite neighbors, or his professional colleagues. So far, the book closely follows the established pattern for such fiction, a wry and antic humor distinguishing “Rummies” from the more solemn competition in the field.

Once the cure is under way, the novel veers away from concentration upon alcoholism and drug abuse to become a mystery-adventure story. The movie queen is found dead and the heiress disappears. Preston’s fellow inmates, now welded into a tightly knit, if oddly constituted, task force, manage to trap the miscreants and expose the hypocrisy that has infected the clinic, corrupting a pure and worthy cause. By the end of the book, the guilty have been punished, the innocent saved, and the recovering addicts restored to constructive, careful lives in the outside world, one hopes permanently.