Anybody Seen O'Brien?

STRANGER COME HOME (369 pp.)--William L. Shirer--Little, Brown ($3.95).

William Lawrence (Berlin Diary) Shirer is not the man to stop writing novels just because he is not very good at it.

His latest is Stranger Come Home, which comes with the assurance that all its characters are "imaginary." But any moderately attentive reader will begin naming the originals who inspired them almost at once, will feel in the end what is sadly true: that Stranger is a sour mash of stale news stories. The only bit of imagination connected with Author Shirer's book is the startling notion of calling it a novel.

Stranger is written in the form of a diary. It is being kept by Raymond Whitehead, who returns to the U.S. after many years as a foreign correspondent to become a news broadcaster (a career that parallels Author Shirer's). Hero Whitehead had once been in the foreign service, but the State Department had found his reports "too literary.'' Someone must have been letting him down gently. Whitehead-Shirer uses "tomes"' and "major opus" for books, "espied" for saw, "eminent solon" for Senator. When Whitehead is thinking deeply, as he does one day at a baseball game, he writes of the fans: "Most of them. I suppose, have mediocre jobs and live in drab houses and have little learning and no appreciation of art." When Senator O'Brien (an "imaginary" character who is responsible for a vicious climate called O'Brienism) goes after Whitehead on trumped-up charges of being a Soviet agent, a lot of recent imaginary history is tediously rewritten. Badgered by O'Brien, his job lost. Whitehead takes off for a Connecticut farm where he bravely exults to diary: "Farming and writing--that will be a life!" Cutting O'Brien down to size may be a worthy aim, but there must be a less tedious way of doirfg it. If there were a Fifth Amendment for literature. Author Shirer should have invoked it. By insisting on being heard, he has clearly incriminated himself as a dreary novelist.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.