Middle of the Journey

TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN (372 pp )--Irwin Shaw--Random House ($4.95).

For Jack Andrus, the memories that come with middle age are like bad teeth: he counts the day good when they do not ache. Among the shooting pains: three marriages, the latest still intact but more testy than tender; an estranged college-age son who loathes him; a foreclosed career as a brilliant young cinemactor; the faces of friends who died in the Spanish Civil War or at the talent-poisoning wells of Hollywood. The anodynes are joyless--alcohol, sleeping pills, the humdrum routine of his NATO underling post in Paris, which is good work, he feels, but not greatly good.

The catacombs of the past might have remained sealed for Jack Andrus if he had not flown down to Rome for two weeks to help an old friend produce a movie. But one of the points of Irwin Shaw's new novel is that the past will not stay buried, and must be exorcised. Like Shaw's previous novels (The Troubled Air, Lucy Crown}, the latest is more make-believe than believable. But its underlying mood is dispiritingly palpable, like a cigarette-lacerated tongue on a hungover dawn.

To propitiate the devils in his mind, Jack courts the devil in the flesh, an Italian girl with the Spanish name of Veronica. But between bedroom and seaside trysts, Jack runs through flashbacks of Wife No. 1, a no-talent Greenwich Village actress, and Wife No. 2, an all-talents Hollywood star and nymphomaniac. When Veronica's boy friend shows up with a knife, Shaw stirs up enough plot to feed parts to an army of extras, expertly guides readers through a movie-colonist's Rome, febrile with sex and chicanery. He sauces his book with piquant if dubious notions, e.g., that the Sistine Chapel proves that Michelangelo's only God was Michelangelo. But like children tottering with grown-up luggage, his characters never seem large enough for the emotions they are forced to carry.

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