SCIENCE FICTION

BEAUTIFUL SOUP by Harvey Jacobs (Celadon Press: $12.95, paper; 272 pp.) It’s difficult to refrain from beginning a review of “Beautiful Soup” with shtick. Such as: Two of the funniest men who ever wrote are Donald Westlake and Peter De Vries. The other one’s Harvey Jacobs.

It’s equally difficult to understand why Jacobs has never received the attention and support he deserves. His stories have appeared in Playboy, Omni, Esquire and the Paris Review; Harper & Row published two earlier books.

His latest, unaccountably, comes from a small press.

In a near future, people’s foreheads are bar-coded to show their station and prospects. Jim Wander, who at first has it made as a straight-A+, later has an accident at the supermarket that strips him not only of privilege but also of his basic human identity: His incontrovertible bar code now identifies him as pea soup. Vigor Salt Free pea soup.

After a stay at the hospital, Wander, uh, Soup, returns home:

“I close my eyes. Trina pats my face. I open. She smiles a sunrise. I grin back. She lifts away my headband with two fingers. I watch her face. Absolutely no sign of revulsion. Her face is blank. Now I feel tears on my face. I reach out to embrace my wife.

“ ‘No, thanks, I’m not hungry. But it looks delicious,’ she says.”

All do not reject him so utterly, however. In his first outing he is pursued by a licensed Beggar Slime holding spoon in one hand, can opener in the other, drooling.

And that, of course, is just the beginning. Bells clanging, lights aflash, the plot’s ball bangs and rebounds from Soup’s immersion in faddish therapies to prison incarceration; from pyrotechnics wizard Morris Feuerbloom, who wants to ride one of his own rockets to heaven, to the bug that visits Wander in his cell to talk and recite poems; from acting lessons that consist mostly of sitting in an old electric chair and feigning electrocution (“It isn’t the frying, it’s how one fries”) to forays of cannibalism, terrorism, flight and pursuit.

In short, a wonderful and wonderfully funny book. The fun house is open late tonight.

“Beautiful Soup” reminds us that in today’s uncertain market, with trade publishers no longer much interested in “mid-list” books, some of our finest writing is being championed and given a home by small presses, to whom we all, all of us who care about books, owe a great debt.