Also Current

IF MORNING EVER COMES by Anne Tyler. 265 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

As the November winds began to bluster off the Hudson, Ben Joe Hawkes just stood in bed, cutting law-school classes and thinking of North Carolina in the morning. Thus begins what the reader fears will be just another could-he-or-couldn't-he-go-home-again book. And it is, save for a couple of differences. For one, First Novelist Anne Tyler, 22, approaches commonplaces with uncommon empathy, insight and wit; and for another, her protagonist has to address himself to an additional puzzle. The chill on Manhattan's Morningside Heights is nothing compared with that in the hearts of his family.

Nine years before, his mother's frosty ways drove his late father to walk out on the Hawkes brood of seven. At 25, Ben Joe is head of the house. But only nominally, for his sisters, even the ten year-old, are as self-possessed as Mother. Drawn by his need to be needed, Ben Joe takes the night train back to Sandhill, N.C. Five nights later, he is traveling north again, with the bitter realization that he is still unneeded at home. But with him is his diffident, dependent old high school girl to serve as "his own little piece of Sandhill transplanted." She will radiate, if little light, more warmth than Ben Joe has ever known.

DAY OF THE GUNS by Mickey Spillane. 192 pages. Dutton. $3.50.

After a 17-year war on personal poverty and the English language, Mickey Spillane now seems to be elevating his sights. The new targets of opportunism: cold war conspiracy and the bereaved readership of the late Ian Fleming.

For the occasion, sloblike old Mike Hammer has been retired in favor of one Tiger Mann. The difference is imperceptible except that Tiger is equipped with an ideological fervor so single-mindless that even the Birch Society might suspect he is some kind of nut. It seems that, thanks to "the college boys in striped pants and the eggheads in Washington, our government has become a joke all the way down into Mau-Mau territory"; the West is sure to "lose everything"-unless Tiger and his extragovernmental CIA can stanch a critical security leak at the U.N. The "commy bastards," it turns out, have penetrated the British delegation, and so, in his inexorable way, does Tiger. The last Red head is blown off and "splashed up against the wall" expeditiously, and a grateful President can take his finger off "the red button."

LAND OF THE HIGH FLAGS by Rosanne Klass. 319 pages. Random House. $5.95.

"The land of the high flags" is what the prophet Zoroaster called the ancient country of the Afghans. The land of the high barriers is what it seemed to U.S. Schoolteacher Rosanne Klass in 1951, when she settled in the capital of Kabul. The barriers were purdah, which segregated man from woman, and the crypto-snobbery that kept the foreign colony aloof from the Afghan people. They were barriers, it would seem, that would last as long as the Koran and Kipling, except that Miss Klass did not come all the way from Cedar Rapids to be barred by them.

Miss Klass wound up teaching English in the country's all-male teachers' training college. The appointment had to be cleared all the way to the Afghan Cabinet, and no one dared to make the further request that they build a ladies' room. Hence it was not aloofness that led Miss Klass to arrange for morning classes only and to bolt home before the daily faculty lunch. Her free time was made freer by the fact that she and her husband, also a teacher, could afford a superb household staff of" four. As a result, they were able to hold almost continuous open house in an attempt to cultivate the Afghans. She herself blazed paths never previously crossed by woman, marching into teahouses, where her entry literally stopped the music. They also, in their two-year stay, managed to traipse around virtually the whole spiney, breath-catching land. In describing these travels. Author Klass has revealed the same purposeful, manipulative skill with words that she has with people.

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