Runaway Witch

By Mary Metcalf

Too bad. Gloria Random, alias Witch, just doesn't make it as the funniest-saddest 17-year-old runaway to hit New York. Maybe it's less her fault than James Leo Herlihy's that The Season of the Witch (Simon & Schuster; $6.95) opts out, not in.

Gloria keeps a diary of her 70-some less than fun-

filled days and nights, in Manhattan. She flees her Belle Woods (Mich.) “dainty quilted prison" by bus with 19-year-old John (alias Roy), a draft-dodging homosexual. John has to go underground to escape the Army and his psychiatrist father. Gloria goes along for the ride and to find her socialist father, a Polish Jew who teaches at a city college (she has never seen him).

ADVENTURES they have. John-Roy, in search of pot, gets mugged-no hard feel-

and the New America out. Next stop, Canada. Then, home to Belle Woods and Mother.

HERLIHY'S now-novel diary style is mostly movieScript choppy. Reflecting the anything-goes way we live and read now, it's mind-deadeningly full of expletives, drug-peace-astrology jargon, people taking off their clothes. What's the matter with The Season of the Witch is that it simply Avenueing and Hollywoodtoys with surfaces Madison ing them with newly minted old tricks of the trade.

Herlihy just never gets a bead on his half-woman, half-child Witch. Mark it down as pot-boiler, not very funny, not very sad, but one that may well be headed for the flicks and Age of Aquarian X-dom. In case you forgot, Herlihy wrote "Midnight Cowboy."