Opus 21, by Phllip Wylie, Rinehart and Co, New York, 375 pp.

Few authors are so serious about expounding their genius and yet so crass about packaging it as Philip Wylie in "Opus 21."

"I am one of the very few men in the world today who understands what is wrong," he says in so many words. "Now listen, all you dumb yucks, while I explain . . ."

Then he introduces a bunch of whores, an atomic scientist, and a lot of other people who will appeal to the folks who read the Saturday Evening Post (and might buy "Opus 21" if properly titillated), and pushes them briskly into conversation with the book's central character, name of Phillip Wylie. Character Wylie takes these chances to deliver Author Wylie's party line, with considerable display of gusto, and the general attitude of a prophet.

Rejects Five Women

As if this highly contrived excuse for a series of monologues weren't sleazy enough, Author Wylie has three of the book's five female characters offer their beautiful bodies to Character Wylie in the course of one feverish weekend, which is the time limit of the action. It is significant that Character Wylie rejects these offers in order to have more chance to talk.

The plot is plentifully larded with other lurid items: a suicide attempt, a dream which shows the end of the world coming when everybody panics at seeing some dirty words mysteriously written in the sky, and another dream in which Jesus Christ passes along the Wylie doctrine to the men in the plane about to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima.

Too Much Taboo

Pulp trash you say. But this is not entirely true. Wylie is consistently entertaining and his basic point that modern civilization completely ignores the instinctual nature of man (by building up a great taboo structure around sex relations, for example) is well taken. The various diatribes in which he elaborates on this central this are mostly accurate and uniformly provocative.

He sums it up near the end of the book. "'My ideals,' he said, 'at least keep a mediocre author plugging to the end.'"

Wylie's mistake (a good money-marking mistake, of course) was to put these ideas into a cheap shiny novel. "Generation of Vipers" said it all much better, years ago, without the girls.

For the person who has never read a Wylie book, "Opus 21" is a good buy, though even then it might be better to dig back to some of his earlier, fresher polemics. The veteran Wylie fan had better stick to memories.