FICTION

BEGIN TO EXIT HERE by John Welter (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: $16.95; 299 pp.) If a newspaper is a civic watchdog (as most newspapers like to assert), maverick reporters are the fleas on the dog. They dig and bite until, sometimes, the beast barks, as it should. But because they’re pests and irritants to their host, they’re always in danger of being flicked into unemployment by a swipe of an editorial hind leg.

Take Kurt Clausen. At 36, he’s a sad-eyed jokester, a tenuously recovered alcoholic, a scarred veteran of failed relationships. He keeps getting fired from newspaper jobs because he’s interested in Life rather than just those circumscribed bits of it called News; he wants to write Prose rather than just gray stuff to fill the spaces around the ads. And, worse, he won’t keep his mouth shut.

In John Welter’s semi-autobiographical novel (which gives off an aroma of revenge as sweet as the sherry Kurt used to drink), things run true to form. Kurt is hired by a North Carolina daily and moves in with a woman named Janice. In short order, he ticks off everybody--golf-course developers, Fundamentalists, the Ku Klux Klan, his memo-happy bosses and, finally, even Janice, who finds Kurt’s brand of flip, personal journalism a lot less amusing when the subject of one of his stories is her own work.

Welter raises a real issue here, and then ducks it by making it an issue only between the two lovers, not between Kurt and the public. He has a keen eye for journalism’s morbid symptoms--not the bias and sensationalism so much as the sameness, stuffiness and timidity--but he’s weak on diagnosis. He blames brain-dead individuals rather than the simple fact that a newspaper is a business, that ads are its lifeblood and that the gray stuff around the ads is, at bottom, just another mass-marketed product.

After working at several papers, Welter evidently realized that he ought to be writing fiction instead. Kurt hasn’t figured this out yet. But if he ever does, and if, like his creator, he can write shaggy-dog stories that are funny, sexy and mournful at the same time, he stands better than a flea’s chance.