(4 of 4)
Much is genuinely funny in Perera's saga of a guilt-ridden innocent abroad. Bendana has a mad. malapropriate sister, who feels "like a fish in Coca-Cola" instead of a fish out of water. He finds himself standing on the road before a brothel "tallying figures in his head, wondering uneasily if they would take a traveler's check." There are lapses, of course. Perera slumps toward collegiate humor or into yuks too obviously derived from the new school of American-Jewish humor. His story line suffers the common affliction of the picaresque novel, midsection-al sag. But Perera always shows a lively talent and, if not yet a full-blown Bellow, his is a most promising puff.
SNAKES by At Young. 149 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $4.95.
Any first novel that is about growing up, being a ghetto black and setting out on a career in the rock-blues world would seem to be artistically disadvantaged from the start. Snakes, without