Short Notices

THE MONUMENT by Nathaniel Benchley. 249 pages. McGraw-Hill. $4.95.

Nathaniel Benchley novels all have a faintly spurious ring, like canned laughter or the new 25-c- piece. That is because Benchley's plots generally straddle the line of plausibility. Like most of his eight other novels, The Monument depends on readers who are willing to believe the unbelievable. Its story deals with a campaign to build a Korean War memorial in Hawley, a little inbred New England town on the Atlantic shore. Even before the selectmen vote on it, this modest proposal nourishes more intrigues than the Orient Express and incites more violence, including suicide and murder, than a Mafia convention. None of the characters ever fully escape their enormous and restrictive obligations to the story. But for all that, the reader may find himself wistfully trying to swallow Benchley's preposterous tale, if only for the bouquet. Benchley writes with a smooth comic skill that is at least reminiscent of that of his father, the late humorist Robert Benchley, who himself aspired to write serious stuff, but never got around to it.

THE SOFT MACHINE by William S. Burroughs. 182 pages. Grove. $5.

To make The Soft Machine even less coherent than his grotesque Naked Lunch, William Burroughs scissored up his manuscript and pasted it back together higgledy-piggledy before turning it in to his publishers. Result: a hallucinatory little nonbook of babble whose most distinguishing feature is a preoccupation with sodomy and the dubious joys thereof. Burroughs apologists insist that there are plot and Profound Meaning imbedded in the book, but only a cultist will find them.

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