Also Current

SPEAK NOT EVIL by Edwin Lanham. 591 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.95.

Grubbing into the lives of small-town sexual delinquents of all ages has been a tempting novelistic idea ever since Peyton Place. Lanham adds an overlay of Big Ideas (religion, tradition, history) but is careful to provide the full familiar stock company: the nymphomaniac who gives strip parties and records the livelier moments on Polaroid film, the budding teen-age sexpot, the aging Don Juan, the middle-aged mother who has never responded to a man, the impotent bridegroom, the spinster who had an abortion in her youth. At one point the high-school-graduate hero launches himself into a discussion of Balzac's Droll Stories: "Why they call it a dirty book I don't know, because if you're writing about people and how they live you can't leave sex out of it." It might start a pleasant new fad to try.

BAD CHARACTERS by Jean Stafford. 276 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95.

In a paragraph Jean Stafford can evoke the ecology of a whole chunk of, say, Colorado, or provide a tour of the inner horizons--often painfully pinched --of her central figures. In her latest assemblage of short stories, this facility might profitably have given way to more deliberate speed, particularly in the most compelling of them, A Winter's Tale. The teller is a matron, with a matron's malaise. Her tale recalls her first affair, which occurred during an academic year spent in Heidelberg under the chaperonage of a pious Catholic convert from Brahmin Boston. The lover is a Nazi pilot who turns out to be 1) a Jew, 2) the secret lover of the girl's devout guardian. To probe such a twisting plot requires more words than Author Stafford here provides. Other stories concern the casualties of child v. parent warfare, of which there are few keener combat correspondents than the author.

ERIC MATTSON by Norman Katkcov. 445 pages. Doub/eday. $5.95.

It is just possible that a negative kind of publishing history will be made by this book: 21st century scholars may know it as the last, because unbeatably the trashiest, of the Big Medical Novels. This novel has absolutely everything, and is so appalling it's hilarious. It has Eric, "a gifted young surgeon at the crossroads." It has interns, residents, nurses, and of course plenty of sex, of the kind that turns out the lights at the point where, all buttons still buttoned, "she brought his face down to her breasts." It has eight major operations, including impromptu open-heart surgery in the library of a posh house--all described in bloody color and with such extreme professional detail that the reader feels he could pull the gloves onto his scrubbed and cornstarched hands and do the next one himself. And the first operation is an emergency caesarean section--on a dog. "Eric came forward until he could feel the table against his thighs. It was just him and the bitch now. The scalpel did not weigh in his hand . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.