FICTION

S. F. W. by A.M. Wellman (Random House: $17.95; 149 pp.) . Holden Caulfield, meet Bart Simpson. A bad attitude can be a sign of youthful idealism, as we know, but 22-year-old A. M. Wellman pushes that proposition to the limit. The hero of his first novel, Cliff Spab, is a high school dropout in a blue-collar suburb of Detroit whose only ambitions are to get high and “marry rich.” Spab and four other people are taken hostage by an anti-nuclear terrorist group that barricades itself in a 7-Eleven store for 36 days. The hostages live on junk food, pot and beer; the terrorists videotape them, in all their squalor, for the nightly news.

Bloodily freed, Spab finds himself a hero, offered the keys to the city and the chance to throw out the first ball at Tiger Stadium. Instead, he disappears and becomes a cult figure. He has no message--that’s his message. He hates the media machine that zaps people’s real identities and leaves them only the “career . . . of just being famous, no matter what you’re famous for doing, which could be nothing at all.” All Spab wants to do is go cruising with his friends, some of them dead. His stoned recollections alternate with equally profane excerpts from the tapes. Wellman had no idea how to end this novel, but it’s sign of his talent that he keeps us interested and amused so long, and that the foul-mouthed Spab and his pals are halfway likable.