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Confusion With a Bounce;

POWDERED EGGS. By Charles Sim-
mons. 222 pp. New York: E. P. Dutton
& Co. $3.95.
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Aug. 23, 1964

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AT my school in wartime England we were continually served

powdered eggs on damp toast. They were cooked to a formula
which has, I hope, been lost. They had two qualities. They were a
vivid yellow never found in nature. And when you dropped them
they bounced.

Charles Summons's first novel is also highly colored, and it

bounces. There the comparison ends. Told in the form of letters
from a self-consciously toughminded young New Yorker, it leaps
from subject to subject, usually with agility. It's an old method and
notoriously hit-ormiss; the jokes either explode devastatingly or
else land with a dull thud.

One of his better jokes, irresistible to a reviewer, is the hostile

review of “Powdered Eggs,” which he publishes toward the end of
the novel. In it he accuses himself of formlessness, obscenity,
pretentiousness, jerkiness, exhibitionism, tastelessness and racial
prejudice. He ends his self-condemnation: “There is even, in the
last section of the book, a harsh mock review of the book itself,
intended, I imagine, to disarm criticism. Well, it fails entirely. Many
is the book reviewer, I suspect, who, like myself, will see in it his
own distaste articulated. In fact, I am now quotr ing word for, word
from the same mock review.”

Most of these accusations are, to use the author's own term for the
fake, so much powdered eggs. The jerkiness is one of the book's
chief virtues, keeping the reader's mind wide awake. The book is
powered with exhibitionism.

If you tried to describe its subject, you would have to say that, like
“Tristram Shandy,” it is about a man. It is also about a novel that
same man is writing, a wild but logical extension of H. G. Wells's
“The Invisible Man.” The new invisible man is more interested in
grabbing sex than power, until he makes a strange discovery. He
finds that all over the world people have become invisible after
excreting by mistake an invisible organ called the floggis. They can
only regain their visibility by finding their own personal floggis.
Editors’ Picks
That is one Mr. Simmons, the seminonsense writer. There is also a
Mr. Simmons who writes an almost straightforward, impassioned Audio Stories are
Redefining Pleasure
account of his father's death. There is another who is bundled into for Women
the confessional by his Catholic girl. He ends up by confessing that
his monumental confession was false. Another Mr. Simmons is I’ve Listened to This
Breakup Song a
painfully race-conscious; yet another is totally delighted by sex. Million Times

Nobody will like all these Mr. Simmonses. Everyone will like some
How You Should
of them. I liked especially the Mr. Simmons who is fascinated by Change Your
Workout Once You
confusion. At work for The Modern Universal International Hit 40
Encyclopaedia, he confides to the reader that all encyclopedias
invent false items in order to catch out other encyclopedias when
they pirate entries. So, in order to lift an item, you have to make
sure that it appears in at least two reference works.

Involved enough? Not for Mr. Simmons. He carries the incestuous

process one stage further and fakes a fake item in order to catch
out rivals. Unfortunately, he forgets to tell his editor. That's the way
to abolish powdered eggs.

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