Short Notices

AGAINST ENTROPY by Michael Frayn. 248 pages. Viking. $4.95.

After spending seven years working for British newspapers, Pundit Michael Frayn is convinced that they are all suffering from a disease called entropy--the process by which things fall apart. Which is just what they do in this engaging novel set in the offices of a large London daily. No one on the staff has more than a passing concern for the interests of the paper. One staffer spends the day turning out scripts for the BBC; another writes syllabuses for grammar school courses; John Dyson, a department head, yearns to establish himself as a television panelist. Frayn's greatest comic invention is to take a horde of thirsty European journalists on a boondoggling press junket to the Near East. At each unlikely way station toward a destination never reached, they consume more and more tree booze, "compliments of Magic Carpet." By the time of the denouement in Ljubljana, -L-5,000 worth of liquid hospitality has been consumed. While they drink, Frayn mocks but does not eviscerate; the chroniclers of a society, he seems to be saying, mirror the society itself.

THE PLOT by Irving Wallace. 828 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95.

Question: Can a book that is obviously destined to be a bestseller be all bad? Answer: Yes. Irving Wallace (The Man, The Prize, The Chapman Report) runs through several plots in The Plot: the Kennedy assassination, a defrocked diplomat's attempt to prove himself innocent of accusations of treason, an ex-President's struggle to uphold his fading reputation, an exiled party girl's scheme to re-enter her native England, a down-and-out reporter's comeback attempt. By a stretch of imagination no greater than Wallace's, Dwight Eisenhower, Christine Keeler, Alger Hiss and the entire journalistic profession could conceivably sue. But why should they? Nobody could accuse Plot's characters of resembling real people.

OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY by Jerome Weidman. 521 pages. Random House. $6.95.

When Jew meets Gentile in the U.S., it is not always a case of one shoving the other off the sidewalk. But such nasty little scuffles have high frequency in the books of Jerome Weidman, as in his 15th novel, Other People's Money. The hero, Victor Smith, is orphaned at three when his parents go down on the torpedoed Lusitania. Young Victor is installed in the luxurious Manhattan home of Walter Weld, his father's employer, where he is later joined by young Philip Brandwine, another orphan of a Weld employee. Remarkably, neither child seems to have any living relatives. More remarkably, both are Jews, but Victor does not know it and Philip pretends he isn't. It further develops that imperious Mrs. Weld, who has lavished attention, money and care on both boys, is a determined anti-Semite, and even though she herself has had a longtime affair with a Jew, she coldly tells Victor that he cannot marry her daughter because he is a Jew. This improbable situation is not redeemed by a literary skill that is no more than competent.

IT'S AN OLD COUNTRY by J. B. Priestley. 276 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $5.95.

At 72, J. B. Priestley is a British institution: a word factory who has turned out 29 volumes of assorted nonfiction and 24 novels. Yet each successive effort manages to offer a number of odd little surprises. The first in this novel is that a man of Priestley's age should be at all interested in examining Swinging Britain; the second is that his study makes such jolly good entertainment. The hero is Tom Adamson, a young Australian university professor who has come to England searching for his absentee father. His quest scrapes his sensibilities against the Big Beat, campy pubs, Socialists, Tories, rebellious kids, bad pork pies--all the things that give the old country its overwrought atmosphere. And he sheds a few colonial illusions in a bedtime encounter with a cool countess.

Priestley plainly sees no reason to despair over the frenzied goings-on, particularly among the kids. In fact, he says, the real "lost souls don't wear their hair long and play guitars. They have crew cuts, trained minds, sign on for research in biological warfare, and don't give their parents a moment's worry.''

R.F.K.: THE MAN WHO WOULD BE PRESIDENT by Ralph de Toledano. 381 pages. Putnam. $6.95.

This biography of Bobby Kennedy is not quite as venomous as Victor Lasky's J.h.K.: The Man & the Myth, nor does it have the I-was-there authenticity of Theodore Sorensen's Kennedy, or the sharp historical insights of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s A Thousand Days. Nevertheless, De Toledano's R.F.K. owes plenty to all three--along with dozens of other filchable Bobby notes and quotes from a multitude of other public-library-shelf sources. Predictaoly, the author has let his right-wing bias warp the good and winnow only the bad from the reams of words that have already been written about Bobby; he has created an absurdly baleful, paste-pot portrait of Kennedy that is as amateurishly written as it is inaccurately reported.

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