ONWARDS!

Since a startlingly vocal and mob-minded youth has taken over the port side of "liberal" politics, the middle-aged intellectual, uncomfortably ill-adjusted, with no peer-group minority club house to call home, is apt to paint himself into a corner of unstrung self-alienation. Nat Hentoff, in a wickedly witty, occasionally sentimental novel, has caught the cries in aspic. Aaron Philips, teacher, anti-Establishment liberal, gravitates between Old Guard activists—John Francis O'Donnell, the labor leader, and Gus Wilson, muscular pacificist—and the cream of the revolutionary young—fat, feisty Levine; flint-eyed Carberry, of the "exclusionary faith"; closed circuit black militants. In the process of worrying his sexual efficacy, Aaron casts about for political action. In meetings with Gus and John Francis, searching for the old faith, the courage of continuing commitment, Aaron watches the elders die or wither in inconclusive action (Aaron leaves a sit-in because of a cold). A hilariously indigenous protest in Times Square leaves Philips in an agony of embarrassment as he totes an unwieldy "Peace" sign off to the station house. Confrontations with the young, particularly Levine, widen the gap. At the last, Aaron takes on the F.B.I. in a dignified, middle-aged, small outrage. Hentoff's sharp eye for the foibles as well as the firmness of the protest leadership cannot wink back the flood of laughter, but this is a salient look at the trials of tweed at the barricades.