Mixed Fiction

THE GREAT WORLD AND TIMOTHY COLT, by Louis Auchincloss (285 pp.; Houghton Mifflin; $3.75), is another saga of the pervasive man in a grey flannel suit (legal division), specifically a young attorney in one of Manhattan's sprawling and powerful law factories. As outlined by Novelist-Lawyer Louis Auchincloss, Timothy Colt's problem is how to conform to a pattern whose place in the moral spectrum lies comfortably between the shining white of pure integrity and the smudgy black of downright dishonesty. At the start, as an eager apprentice in the prosperous firm of Sheffield, Knox, Stevens & Dale, young Timmy, top student and Law Review editor, fairly radiates integrity. He worships Partner Henry Knox, the kindly, austere senior who regards his firm as "a group of gentlemen loosely associated by a common enthusiasm for the practice of law," and has nothing but lofty contempt for Partner Sheridan Dale, the go-getting parvenu who thinks of his job as "big business."

Sulking like an adolescent when revered Partner Knox assigns him to do some of Partner Dale's dirty work, Timmy concludes that Knox's talk of high purpose is all empty words, bitterly begins cutting moral corners himself. He ends with his career in ruins, his marriage in pieces, and his own integrity damaged past repair. But through it all, Counselor Auchincloss does not adduce any convincing evidence to counter the verdict of a willowy interior decorator: "Let's face it, dear. You and I both adore Timmy," he tells Timmy's mistress, "but we can still admit he's a dull boy."

THUNDER IN THE ROOM, by Harris Downey (205 pp.; Macmillan; $3), is a first novel which attempts a Joycean account of a day in the life of some citizens of a Southern capital, but often it seems more like a long afternoon spent in a botanical garden. From the very first page, when beautiful Stella Madden catches the delicate odor of spring, the prose thrusts up stalks of dracaena, carnations, ger-beras, tulips, coleuses, yaupon, oleander, jasmine, gladioli, magnolia and azalea. Even the characters come equipped with floral borders: Yancey, a condemned murderer, "clutches his hyacinth-red hair"; beautiful Stella thinks of herself as an or chid, is suspended on "a liana of ecstasy."

The reader who hacks his way through this exotic vegetation discovers that Yancey is awaiting execution at the state penitentiary. This event clouds the day of Stella Madden, the governor's wife, and brings emotional upset to Lucy Warren, who once taught Yancey in school. By evening, Yancey is dead, Stella relieved, Lucy resigned. Along the way Author Downey explores the moods, memories and relationships of the two women. Scene after scene is interestingly done, but as a whole, the book is too much like the red japonicas Stella dotes over: dazzling but insubstantial.

COUNT LUNA, by Alexander Lerne/-Holenla (252 pp.; Criferion; $4), cross-pollinates Poe and Kafka to tell two Gothic tales of the occult. The title tale, Count Luna, is set in present-day Vienna. Alexander Jessiersky, frayed scion of a shoddy aristocratic line, fears that a penniless Count Luna whom he has uninten tionally wronged will return from a concentration camp grave to exact revenge. One night he hears footsteps on the floor above his palace study, storms out and plunges a pair of scissors repeatedly into the fleeing, shadowy figure of the intruder --only to discover that he has murdered his wife's cousin and illicit lover. Still gunning for the elusive Count Luna, Jessiersky next kills a huntsman poaching near his country shooting box. When the police close in, Jessiersky flees the country for Rome, and under the impression that he must avoid moonlight if he is to outwit his phantom enemy, dies in the labyrinth of the Catacombs with an early cartographer's unreliable map in his hands.

Thus Austrian Author Lernet-Holenia, 59, himself patrician-born and a former officer of the Imperial Austrian Army, elliptically describes how a ruling class shorn of its power can be startled by phantoms and into fantasies. Yet, in sum, his talent is special, minor, and eccentric --fit literary fare perhaps only for devotees of what might be called seance fiction.

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