BOOK REVIEW : A Sprawling Picaresque Novel : PINTO AND SONS <i> by Leslie Epstein</i> ; Houghton Mifflin $19.95, 419 pages

The narrator and protagonist of Leslie Epstein’s ambitious novel, “Pinto and Sons,” is an unquiet spirit; a hopeful and hapless fictional wanderer among the moral lights and darknesses of 19th-Century America’s expansion and progress.

A Central European Jew and precocious Harvard medical student, Pinto is a prodigy of energy. He is an impassioned seeker who blunders through discovery, wins and loses in uninterrupted succession, seizes upon truth and muddies it; and finally subsides in a melancholy resignation that suggests a national as well as a personal destiny.

The pattern of “Pinto and Sons” is manic hope followed by black despair. It opens with Pinto, at 15, in the hemicycle of the Massachusetts General Hospital, where he and other students are witnessing the first use of ether in surgery. He is weeping because he is dazzled by human progress; and because he is freed from the fear that he will not be able to become a surgeon himself because of the pain.

That is the pure side; the crass side follows, when his fellow student, Townsend, enlists him in a series of experiments aimed at getting a patent for the process before its inventor does. A charnel-like scene ensues when the students messily amputate the gangrenous leg of a black man who does odd jobs around Harvard Yard. A professor discovers them and they are expelled.

Pinto fishes corpses out of the Charles River and sells them to finance a trip to join the Hungarian revolutionaries of 1848. He stows away aboard a Europe-bound ship, only to find it is headed for the California Gold Rush. He and Townsend work a few claims, make some money and lose it. With a peddler’s pack, he trades with the Modoc Indians and makes a small fortune from their gold ornaments.

As if in atonement, he opens a school for the Indian boys, whom he teaches the miracles of science, and names them, after his heroes, Kepler Jim, Newton Mike, Bacon Jack. Their parents, meanwhile, work under brutal exploitation in the deep mine that Townsend has opened, after bringing in capital and equipment from back East.

While Townsend drives his workers mercilessly to deepen the mine shaft to a mile, Pinto and his Indian disciples labor feverishly to develop a vaccine for the rabies that has spread through the settlement. Just as they achieve it, a fearful blast destroys both Townsend’s mine and their vaccine. Later, when trouble develops between the Modocs and the white settlers--two white children are brutally murdered--Pinto temporarily joins the white war-party.

Its expedition is bloodily ambushed, and the Army comes to help. Negotiations are set up and collapse, Pinto is captured and finds himself back with his apprentices-turned-warriors. The Indians are encircled and under siege: Pinto invents a machine gun with the help of his boys. For a while, it gives them the edge, but the Army brings mortars and machine guns of their own--Pinto didn’t know it, but they had already been invented--and prevails.

Some of the Indians are executed, others are imprisoned in Alcatraz. Pinto retires from his adventures and subsides into a prosperous department store. Years later, he reads of Pasteur’s rabies cure. He goes out to Alcatraz and shouts the news up at the walls, in case any of his Indians are still alive.

Epstein’s irony and wit combine to produce a number of such vivid moments. Particularly good is his account of Pinto and his boys fashioning their “gun-machine” by trial and error, and with the crudest of parts. The process is engrossing, but what transforms it, in the book’s crowning moment, are the inventors’ reactions.

The Indians weep at the prospects for carnage. Pinto argues that it is so terrible a weapon that it will end war. He proposes offering a gun to the encircling Army, although this is clearly impossible. He goes on to imagine giving machine guns to the warring nations of Europe, thus ensuring peace ever afterwards. It is madness; it is also prophetic madness.

“Pinto and Sons” sprawls; and not in a way that favors it. The various narratives--ether experiments, the Gold Rush, peddling among the Indians, the rabies and machine gun discoveries, the mine-building and mine disaster, the Indian war, don’t always connect. And often there is a hyper-activity--the kind that substitutes for emotion in Hollywood car chases--and an odd though sporadic hyper-emotionalism.

It is as if the author were trying to shore up the novel’s principal weakness. This, oddly enough, is Pinto. He is colorful, touching and expressive, but he never entirely exists; at least, not with enough strength and coherence to act both as narrator and protagonist of the book’s high-spirited and undisciplined herd of plots and purposes.

A picaresque novel--the novel as wandering--requires a stout pair of legs. Sometimes it seems as if the author, instead of letting Pinto do all the walking, had picked him up and ferried him from display to display.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Distant Friends” by Greg Johnson (Ontario Review Press).