FICTION

RIGHTS by Lawrence Goldstone (The Permanent Press: $21.95; 325 pp.) In Lawrence Goldstone’s New York City, things are going to hell in a liberal handbasket. When a deli owner has the cops roust a bum who defecates on the sidewalk in view of his customers, the resulting civil rights brouhaha forces the owner to retire, costs his workers their jobs and ultimately doesn’t help the bum. When a rookie patrolman shoots the 18-year-old girlfriend of a drug kingpin, the resulting police brutality case turns into a media circus in which the biggest clowns are ratings-hungry TV newspeople, opportunistic lawyers and self-anointed spokesmen for the black community.

Goldstone, who has a Ph.D. in political science, makes the message of his first novel clear: We pay too much attention to rights and too little to responsibilities. Welfare and affirmative action hurt minorities more than they help. Elevating bums to the status of the “homeless” only increases their numbers. Minority “leaders” who exploit racial grievances are hiding their inability to make it on their own. The heroine of the novel--a black woman, just to show that Goldstone himself is no racist--is a hard-working single mother of three who, ironically, turns out to have no rights at all.

Even readers who dismiss Goldstone’s views as conservative boilerplate will admit that he can tell a story. He has an impressive grasp of the system whose failures he describes. In fact, “Rights” is such a gloomy and scathing picture of urban life that it undermines its own ideology; the solutions it implies--revoke the Miranda rules, lock up the shysters and vaporize all the pretty people on the tube--are obviously insufficient.