Hit the gong, Chuck Barris novel is reissued

FOR Americans of a certain age, watching TV game shows has to rank as one of the great, vacuous pleasures of the mid-20th century. The golden age of game shows, spearheaded by classics like “Queen for a Day,” the notorious “Twenty One” and the subversive “The Groucho Marx Show,” perhaps reached its glorious finale with “The Gong Show.”

The show, a raucous yet basically anodyne talent contest in which only planted fakes ever got gonged (or in modern parlance, “voted off the island”), was an immediate hit. By 1978, when NBC yanked the show for ongoing violations of “decency” (for quaint high jinks by current standards), it already had brought fortune and visibility to its young impresario-host, Chuck Barris, who went on to become a one-man cornucopia of game show concepts, occasional author and highly successful entrepreneur.

Barris’ 1973 novel, “You and Me, Babe,” has been reissued in an expanded edition -- a “director’s cut,” according to the cover blurb. At the start of this nostalgic pas de deux, male lead Tommy Christian introduces himself as a New York dreamer and slacker, in his 20s in the 1950s, a wannabe writer from a poor but heart-of-gold nuclear family. (On Dad’s job: “Being a dentist wasn’t an easy way to make a living ... hovering around the inside of strangers’ spit-filled halitocular mouths.” Egged on by his practical sister and mother, Tommy courts young Sammy Wilkerson, who, although he nervously disses her to his pals as “a walking affliction ... an alcoholic, a nervous tic, and adopted to boot,” has the saving grace of being a fantastically wealthy heiress from Greenwich, Conn.

Sammy also turns out to be a real good kid, a princess-in-a-tower needing only champion Tommy to rescue her from her heartless, fantastically materialist parents, and thus miraculously cure her of all her handicaps.

But just as she is looking like a game-show wish come true and Tommy begins to realize what a lucky guy he is, the gold leaf peels off the prize. Sammy is disinherited -- “because you disobeyed me you are not getting one red cent,” her enraged father tells her -- in a melodramatic showdown worthy of “The Perils of Pauline.”

No matter: After various newlywed trials and adventures (including loser jobs, a year wandering in Europe, the creation of an unpublished novel and a baby), just as the plucky duo are down to their last few bucks, Tommy lands a deal with the American Broadcasting Corp. to launch “The Cinderella Game,” a show he’s dreamed up. A game show. A show that immediately hits the big time, landing Sammy and Tommy in clover but also upending their “you and me, babe” idyll, as Tommy flings himself into the high life of deals, Rolls-Royces and empire-building, neglecting the home fires.

Barris leans toward autobiography. His subsequent books, “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” and the less madcap “The Game Show King,” are variations on the theme of self. Readers of “You and Me, Babe” also can spot autobiographical leitmotifs -- Barris’ favorite midtown restaurant, an Irish boozer buddy, the blooming of parental guilt.

The novel goes down quickly in 55 short chapter-scenes, filled mostly with dialogue that is sometimes snappy but often rather wooden. Barris has no petty hang-ups about employing cliches, whether in phrase -- “frozen with terror, like a deer caught in an automobile’s headlights” -- or in plot, where the mystery of Sammy’s biological parentage is solved with a flourish Charles Dickens might have rejected as overused. Most of the secondary characters -- Sammy’s white-glove family, Tommy’s bosses and buddies -- are stock props recognizable at the first twirl of a mustache. Even the two romantic leads stray in and out of focus over the long haul from first blush to grandparenthood.

Perhaps it’s the extended time-span that gives “You and Me, Babe” the feel of being two stories rather than one (improved Tommy with Sammy, shallow Tommy without her). Although Barris sprinkles in some real nuggets of wisdom on what makes relationships work (or not), “A Money Story” might have been a more apt subtitle. But after all, with what kind of whimper might Erich Segal’s 1970 bestseller have ended if his ingenue in “Love Story” hadn’t had the grace to die young?

Kai Maristed is the author of the novels “Broken Ground,” “Out After Dark” and “Fall.”