Short Notices

Three new books by staff members of TIME:

THE WALLS OF HEAVEN, by Robert McLaughlin (381 pp.; Simon & Schuster; $4.95), is set in Phrygia, a small phantom country in the Middle East that is startlingly like Lebanon. For Novelist McLaughlin (The Notion of Sin), the resemblance is pure convenience. What interests him is his own proposition that today only the world's small countries produce the "hero-leaders" in the classic mold. In Phrygia, passions are still politics, feuds are more important than primaries, and the bitterness of centuries can clash in the exchange of a glance.

Phrygia's hero-leader is dedicated, urbane and devout Mario Neroun, who carried his country to freedom and is now desperately trying to hold together its evenly divided factions. A footloose American historian. Wade Hendrix, finds himself deep in intrigue both of the political and the boudoir variety--Neroun has a lovely mistress named Poppy, who is a considerable trial to the dictator's Christian conscience. The characters represent every racial and religious faction--Yonarus, the fanatic chief of police who is also the secret head of the Christian terrorist organization; U.N. Ambassador Othoe, Poppy's aging, homosexual husband; Iskander Jamal, the flabby leader of the Moslem opposition. Besides its obvious parallel with Lebanon and its divided population, the book has a more esoteric derivation from the story of Emperor Nero, his favorite Poppaea, and her husband Otho. Apart from his ingenious historical allusions. Author McLaughlin, a TIME foreign news writer, offers wry observations on the follies of fanaticism, the ironies of power, and the value of the untidy solution and the unresolved crisis. Many a reader who has felt he will never understand Middle Eastern politicians may find a sudden illumination, and even a new sympathy.

A MONTH OF SUNDAYS, by Louis Kronenberger (186 pp.; Viking; $3.75), is a witty farce with only a semblance of plot: Mrs. Vizard opens hostilities against Mrs. Bannerman because the latter serves Brown Betty for dessert. The scene is Serenity House, a resort version of Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, whose guest list makes the crowd at Bleak House look like a convention of bond salesmen. There are, among others, the social arbiter Mrs. Cortelyou ("When above 79th Street, do as they do above 79th Street"); the warring psychiatrists Dr. Onan L. Digges ("the Saniflush of the Unconscious") and the "Freudy-cat" Dr. Selig J. Reichner; Miss La Fosse, who claims that she graduated from Vassar at twelve and rode "pillion on an older man's motor cycle" long before anyone heard of Lolita. When these characters converge in the back corridors or the main dining hall of Serenity House, they strike continuous comic sparks. At times the characters--and the book--show the strain of trying to make every moment a madcap one. But most of the time Author Kronenberger--biographer (Marlborough's Duchess), social commentator (Company Manners), novelist (Grand Right and Left), and TIME theater critic for 23 years--keeps the repartee fresh and furiously flying. Moreover, he makes the reader accept his lunatic world on its own farcical terms--no mean achievement in an age in which written wit is closer to Saniflush than to serenity.

THE SECRET SPEECH, by John Robinson Beal (138 pp.; Duell, Sloan & Pearce; $3.50), is a satiric political fantasy that looks ahead to Khrushchev's overthrow, as explained by his imaginary successor, Comrade Dmitri Pushkov. (Khrushchev's fate is only hinted at: he becomes manager of the State Circus Trust.) Calmly, point by point--in a parody of Khrushchev's own speech in 1956 enumerating Stalin's errors--Pushkov proves to a Communist Party Congress that the man who once had only to pound on a U.N. desk with his shoe to frighten the world has really been utterly inept. In fact, suggests Pushkov (and Author Beal) in a pointed reversal of cliches, it was the Russian bigwigs who saw Khrushchev "playing American roulette with Russian security" and looked on with dismay as he became "soft" on capitalism.

U.S. alarmists took Khrushchev's crudities and clowning as masking political genius, but in reality, he was too soft at Camp David on Berlin, wrong when he broke up the summit meeting in Paris, messed up the U-2 affair, helped build up NATO through his own "brinkmanship," and built up China too fast. Happy with his rockets, he neglected other weapons and left Russia vulnerable to attack. The Secret Speech is not meant as an exercise in smugness. Author Beal, for ten years TIME's State Department correspondent and now bureau chief in Ottawa, does not underrate Russia or even Khrushchev; he is merely tired of seeing his fellow citizens underrate the U.S.

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