Mixed Fiction

KATHERINE, by Anya Seton (589 pp.; Houghton Mifflin; $3.95).

The Plantagenets really lived it up. They dined on roast lark, ginger fritters and porcupine seethed in almond milk, and their halls were strewed with cartloads of rose petals. The Plantagenets' brides were not so hot, but their mistresses were every bit as toothsome as the ginger fritters. Such a dish was Katherine de Roet, the daughter of an obscure herald. She had scarcely settled down at the court of Edward III when she was nearly raped by a dour Saxon knight. The gay John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, later prominent in Shakespeare ("Live in thy shame, but die not shame with thee"), rescued Katherine and saw her safely married to the knight. But soon John, too, was panting after her. Eventually, she presented John with four bouncing bastards, who were legitimized by King and Pope in due course, after Kate's first husband and John's other wives conveniently died. In Katherine, Author Seton (Dragonwyck, My Theodosia) has expertly laced up a busty novel of historical fact and feminine fancy that is sure to find favor among the Plantagenets of Hollywood.

MADAME DE, by Louise de Vilmorin, translated by Duff Cooper (54 pp.; Messner; $2.50), is a literary visit from the frail, salon-bred French writer whose fans think that she may succeed to Colette's place as first lady of French letters. Author de Vilmorin has a wonderful flair for wacky as well as genuine elegance, and writes with a kind of passionate superficiality rarely attempted since the courtly novel died with the French court. Madame De, already known to some U.S. moviegoers in an excellent screen version (TIME, July 26), is a high-society triangle in which a pair of diamond earrings wanders from husband to wife to jeweler to mistress to lover to wife and back to husband, evoking tinkles of high comedy and muted tragedy on the way. The story is a tiny wonder, perfect and trivial as a Japanese miniature tree.

JULI ETTA, translated by Alison Brothers (147 pp.; Messner; $3), is a contrasting companion piece from the same perfumed pen. It is a moony, brilliant bit of boy-meets-girlishness, more or less what might have happened if Stendhal had been writing for Sam Goldwyn. The ideal cast: Gary Grant, Gene Tierney and Audrey Hepburn. The plot: Tierney, a high-fashion cutie, comes for a visit at the country house of Grant, her fiance. No sooner has she arrived than Grant discovers that Hepburn, a runaway adolescent, has parked herself on his premises. Sure that Tierney won't understand, he hides the girl in the attic. From there out, it is pie-in-the-eye farce, but with a gentle sigh to be heard, just offscreen, for the inexorable way of a maid with a man. Best of all is the fine satin cushion of language underneath the folderol.

THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE, by Evan Hunter (309 pp.; Simon & Schusfer; $3.50). Everybody talks about juvenile delinquency, but Evan Hunter, who used to teach at a New York City vocational high school, has done something about it. He has written a nightmarish but authentic first novel about the problem that should scare the curls off mothers' heads and drive the most carpet-slippered father to vigilant attendance at the P.T.A. On his first day at North Manual Trades, earnest young English Instructor Richard Dadier stops a 17-year-old from raping a new instructor on the stairs. Within two weeks seven boys waylay Dadier in an alley and beat, kick and gouge him into insensibility. The horny-handed principal and the cynical older instructors are no help to Rick Dadier in his attempts to awaken his pupils' bored, backward minds. When one boy pulls a knife on him, Dadier fights furiously, gets his arm slashed --and the class suddenly sides with him. The knifer is pinned down by other boys, and Dadier senses that there is a law of sorts in the blackboard jungle after all. He is even allowed to march the culprit off to the principal's office (and reform school), having won the right in trial by combat.

REUNION, by Merle Miller (345 pp.; Viking; $3.95). Author Miller, whose second novel, That Winter, showed him as a man who could write without having observed, has produced his fourth novel and can now safely be placed with that group of contemporary novelists who might be called Circumstantialists. The Circumstantialist, like the pack rat, cannot bear to throw anything away. Meticulously, he collects and records every circumstance of his characters' lives. Turning over every last scrap of detail, he seems to hope desperately that somewhere he and the reader may catch some glimpse of a real life beneath the litter of facts. Reunion concerns the get-together, eight years after, of eight survivors of a battle-scarred company. In the cast: the rising young lawyer with a beautiful wife and a not-so-beautiful Greenwich Village mistress, the ex-sergeant who plays the horses and the fillies, the gentleman farmer whose wife is unfaithful (he encourages it), the smalltown publisher whose wife is also unfaithful (he would deplore it), and Homer Aswell, who believes he is dead. Miller relentlessly records everything-the brand of cigarettes they smoke, the way they like their Martinis, the jobs they had, the girls they missed, how their houses are furnished, how they take a bath. This may not really add up to a novel, but readers will have some fun "recognizing" themselves or their friends in some of the meticulous sketches.

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