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MINE EYES HAVE SEEN THE GLORY by Tristram Coffin. 303 pages. Macmillan. $5.95.

Chief and most unbelievable charac ter in this self-proclaimed "novel of the new American revolution" is Arkansas Representative Timotheus Denney, who is cast as the legislative wizard and bourbon-breathing Grand Dragon of all the sheetless Klansmen on Capitol Hill. This Ozark Ozymandias wants the Government to build him a $2 billion Denney Dam back in Yell County, Ark. But he faces an ironic choice: the dam will be voted out of committee only if Denney pledges support for a civil rights bill. Never, he yells, and threatens to touch off race war if the dam doesn't go through. But before Denney can rouse his rabble, he learns that his son David (he has another son, but he is half-Negro and does not count) has been arrested with a bunch of freedom riders and beaten to sour mash in jail. It is enough to make a man get religion --and that is what old Tim Denney does. Before anyone could say John Brown, he votes for civil rights, gets his dam, retires from politics, and is named Best Christian of the Year. Au thor Coffin, who once put in time as a legman for Drew Pearson, is obviously sincere in his fictionalized pamphleteering. Fortunately, the cause of civil rights does not desperately need his help.

FOR THE GOOD OF THE CAUSE by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. 190 pages. Praeger. $3.95.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is doubtless the least favorite novelist of Russia's remaining Stalinists: he always makes them the villains. In his much-publicized first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he catalogued the horrors of a Stalinist labor camp. His second novel (after a pair of anti-Stalinist short stories) is slighter and shorter, but the target is still recognizable. The concentration camps are no longer in evidence, but the Stalinist greasy-collared thugs have only turned into white-collar bureaucrats: bald, corpulent, obtuse paper shufflers. Their opponents are ardent provincial youths who scoff at party propaganda and joke about the Virgin Lands program--but who eagerly take direct action, in the old "Hero of Labor" tradition, to build themselves a new school. Just as they are fitting the final doorknob, word comes that the party plans to take over the new building to house a chemical-research institute. The youths protest, but the party district leader is a petty Stalin, and from his decision there is no appeal. Or rather, Author Solzhenitsyn implies, from this kind of implacable obstructionism there is only one appeal, and his novel is voicing it.

THRILLING CITIES by Ian Fleming. 246 pages. New American Library. $4.95.

Advertised as "a James Bond tour of the world's 14 most sinful cities," this book is, instead, possibly the year's most flagrant fake. Five years ago, the London Sunday Times asked Author Fleming to take a round-the-world tour to write some local-color travel pieces for the titillation of its family audience. Fleming did; the aging essays reprinted here are the result. About the closest Fleming got to sin was a $2 taxi dance in Macao and a $100 bet in Las Vegas. Most of the time he hardly troubles to conceal his boredom. Honolulu he found "just another reservation for the pensioners," which he left "without many regrets." Berlin's night life "is certainly not what it used to be." In New York, "I enjoyed myself least of all." As travel writing, the book is silly and vulgar; as a guidebook, hopelessly inadequate and out of date; as a promotion package, probably a moneymaker.

THE MORTAL WOUND by Raffaele La Capria. 191 pages. Farrar, Straus. $4.95.

This novel of decay, disillusion and a spurious dolce vita attracted a wide audience of Italian readers, and won the Strega literary prize in 1961. The nominal heroine is a girl with a blonde ponytail, a little boy's face and a woman's body, who exists as a fixation of love in the narrator's past; the real heroine, however, is the blowzy city of Naples, which either "mortally wounds you or puts you to sleep." The dialogue (in better-than-average translation) has a crisp, contemporary cadence, and the writing can be perceptive and well-tooled, but La Capria pushes his confusingly large cast onstage in the manner of a cinematographer who dabbles in impressionism. Though the satire shows talent and the technique is modishly modern, the mortal wounds of the characters emerge finally as that most difficult of subjects --futility.

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