Magic Time

MAGIC TIME By Daniel M. Klein. (Doubleday, $1495.) The fortunes of five friends, Harvard graduates who took part in Timothy Leary's first LSD experiment in 1961, are traced with verisimilitude and narrative vigor in Daniel M. Klein's third novel. Although the events and characters in ''Magic Time'' seem real, they are overly familiar and abstract, rather than specific. Mr. Klein has researched his period so that all his characters perform in ways that are historically accurate rather than individually resonant. His most successful character - the elusive, enigmatic Timothy Leary, who provides the five friends their memorable night in 1961 - appears only in the background. He pops up throughout the novel in their reveries and, finally, in 1979 when they all gather for a 40th birthday celebration of one of the five, they see him starring in a comedy act at a nightclub. They gaze up at Leary ''as if he had just materialized by magic, as fresh and sneaky as a hallucination.'' The five men go through the rituals of the 1960's - the Peace Corps, radicalization, drugs, sexual promiscuity. Yet there is anything but magic in Mr. Klein's account of the period; he writes from a wearied distance. Four of the men graduate into the 70's as ''successes'' - a lawyer, a playwright, a divinity student, a millionaire leader of a successful Jerry Rubin-style ''Metamen'' group. The fifth gets snagged in the radical underground after a stint as a Peace Corps volunteer and is killed.


The novel's pleasures are the result of the author's careful attention to detail and craftsmanship, but they are undercut by formulaic characters and a plot that never yields a surprise. ''Magic Time'' is well constructed, but the reader sees the wheels at work. Only Timothy Leary escapes Mr. Klein's schematic approach to characterization and, despite his shadowy presence, emerges as believable.

By David Evanier, New York Times Books, May 13, 1984