Whittington Without Cat

BILLY LIAR (191 pp.}-- Keith Water-house--Norton ($3.95).

Billy Fisher is hardly an angry young menace, but he might be mistaken for a highly comic younger brother of Play wright John Osborne's backward-scowling Jimmy Porter. At 18 or so. he is a mortician's clerk in a scruffy little Yorkshire town, so benumbed by his surround ings that he fancies he has caught an entirely new disease, Fisher's Yawn. When his earthbound parents mulishly refuse to, understand his plans for becoming a scriptwriter in London, he retaliates in his imagination by inventing a set of properly sophisticated, London-based par ents, including a frightfully U mother who merely looks up from her solitaire when he comes home drunk and drawls indulgently: ''Oh God, how dreary!"

Leaping boredom and vaulting ambition are not Billy's only reasons for wanting to leave town. He is on the point of being exposed for an impressive list of minor misdeeds. A great pile of undertaker's promotional calendars, supposed to have been mailed a year before, still have not been mailed out, and the stamp money has gone for beer. At least two young women think they are engaged to him. Because the clacking of his own tongue can drown the ceaseless humming of the humdrum, he has told an elaborate and pointless series of lies.

Like a flyweight Samson, Billy sets everything tumbling with one incredible heave, then changes his mind and dashes about trying to catch the pieces. British Novelist Waterhouse agitates his farce with vigor as Billy makes up his mind to leave for London, tells off his parents, resigns his job and, in an apocalyptic mood, wastes an hour feeding what he supposes are aphrodisiac pills to one of his fiancees. After further complications, Billy becomes entwined with, if not actually engaged to a third girl.

Before the end, as is likely to be the case in a picaresque novel, the goings-on become a little hard to swallow. Disbelief can, in Coleridge's phrase, be suspended willingly, but it should not be hung by the neck until dead. The fault is not really important. With his portrayal of Billy, a Dick Whittington who misplaces his cat and never makes it to London. Author Waterhouse has created one of the year's most entertaining characters.

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