Short Notices

WHEN SHE WAS GOOD by Philip Roth. 306 pages. Random House. $4.95.

Obtuse, self-pitying, domineering, obsessive, hypocritical, opinionated, exacting, intolerant, selfish, malevolent, deluded, manic--in fact, just about every pejorative word in the language could be applied to Lucy Nelson. She is a young woman who would try a reader's patience in a short story; in a lengthy novel she can scarcely be borne.

The real case against Lucy is not that she is "unsympathetic"--some of the greatest characters in fiction are--but that she is theatrically unsatisfying and an ear-jarring bore. Saddest of all, Philip Roth's second novel starts beautifully, with a fine evocation of the Wisconsin mood and climate and the skillful and sympathetic drawing of Willard Carroll, an assistant postmaster, one of the few "good" men in contemporary fiction. But then Lucy, Carroll's granddaughter, takes over in a truly venomous fashion, and the book strives embarrassingly to become a Midwestern Madame Bovary. It is bewildering that a writer as gifted as Roth could devote so much effort to so trivial a heroine; the high promise of his 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus is still unfulfilled.

FAREWELL TO TEXAS by William O. Douglas. 242 pages. McGraw-Hill. $6.95.

For the fourth time, the grizzled old Texan from the Big Thicket was hauled up before the court for making moonshine. Since the judge knew that the old man made whisky only for his own use, he spoke gently. "George, the commercial distillers put out a real good product these days, and they sell it at a reasonable price. I know you don't have much money, but it would be far better for you simply to buy a bottle every now and then than to keep on making this stuff and keep on getting caught."

"I dunno," said the moonshiner.

"Of course I'm right," the judge said. "I'll prove it. How much do you drink?"

"A half-gallon a day for me," said the old man, "and then there's the family."

Such folksy Texas tales are a delightful leavening in this book, squeezed in between recipes for red corncob jelly and descriptions of what it is like to shoot the narrow, roaring rapids on the Rio Grande. After 20 books (Beyond the High Himalayas, A Wilderness Bill of Rights), Author Douglas has proved that he is a more beguiling travel writer and a far more gifted naturalist than one expects from an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. This account of his meanderings through the wilderness areas of Texas has one major flaw: the Justice gives such a fascinating picture of the glories of the bayous and the wonders of the baygalls that one almost ignores the author's plea for a sound conservationist program.

THE CONVERTS by Rex Warner. 337 pages. Atlantic-Little Brown. $5.95.

When Augustine quit Carthage for Rome to pursue his career as a teacher of rhetoric, he took along his mistress Lucilla and their young son and left his pious mother at the church. Mother had been hoping for his conversion to Christianity. It was a sharp stroke in the struggle between sensual and spiritual forces within the young African intellectual. Still, the flesh had won only a battle--it lost the war.

Remorse came immediately, and Augustine's mother Monnica arrived in Rome shortly thereafter. Her dearest dreams for her favorite son came true: a government appointment at Milan, the prospect of marriage into a wealthy and influential family, a break with Lucilla (who went sadly back to Africa to enter a religious house), and conversion to Monnica's own Christian faith, in which he was eventually to become a bishop and a saint.

Augustine's conversion and the events leading up to it are the subject of Rex Warner's novel, which, like his earlier historical fiction (The Young Caesar, Imperial Caesar and Pericles the Athenian), gives the impression of being a careful translation from a newly discovered ancient manuscript. In this case, it would have been no great loss to the world had the manuscript remained undiscovered. The narrator of The Converts is a young friend and countryman of Augustine, a naive and verbose lawyer named Alypius, who writes down his thoughts "rather for my own benefit than for that of anyone else." The thoughts of this youth are long, long thoughts. It's too bad Lucilla didn't keep a journal. And if Augustine had written his own confessions--but he did, didn't he? Who needs Alypius?

ALL MEN ARE LONELY NOW by Francis Clifford. 251 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.95.

The newest practitioner of the le Carre school of thriller writing is Francis Clifford (The Naked Runner), and his is a reliable product. All the pieces fall into place, including the Old Man who never shows his feelings, and the girl with the remorseless libido ("Tired," she complains to a weary partner, "is another word for selfish"). Nor is there a shortage of ominous tableaux: "Conway would be at the airport now, he and certain others, waiting, almost strangers even to themselves."

Fortunately, Clifford also offers an innovation. His is the first spy book about a spy who has clearly read all the other spy books. A traitor comfortably placed in Whitehall, he concocts a successful scheme of classic simplicity and expects everyone else to act in character--chiefs to be Old School, pawns to be pawns, secretaries to be as compassionate as Claire Bloom. The book may lack le Carre's ennobling existential fog or Deighton's perverse inventiveness, but the spy-who-has-beaten-the-system is a good enough gimmick to carry all a thriller needs: an effective plot.

RICHARD STRAUSS: THE LIFE OF A NON-HERO by George R. Marek. 350 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.95.

The composer of Der Rosenkavalier, Salome and Don Juan poses two paradoxes for biographers. He wrote music that exuded adventure, wit and lush eroticism; yet professionally and privately Richard Strauss was a business-like burgher and a boringly faithful, frau-pecked husband (his wife would shout at him, "Richard, go ahead and compose!"). He loomed in the early 1900s as a bold shaper of forms for 20th century music; yet in nearly 30 prolific years after World War I, his muse hobbled as often as it soared.

In this commendable biography, George R. Marek, sometime music historian (Puccini, Opera as Theater) and former head of RCA Victor Records, makes the background of Strauss's life the foreground. He works the man, the music and the supporting characters into a vivid suite evoking German cultural life. After 1918, he believes, Strauss was caught in the strands of political decay and social upheaval and torn by his own equivocal attitudes toward the Nazi regime. Cut off from its romantic roots, "Strauss's mind was not strong enough to wing above the times." Great as he was, concludes Marek, he could have been greater had his world not been "too much with him."

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