Variously Notable

CHRISTIE MALRY'S OWN DOUBLE-ENTRY by B.S. JOHNSON 185 pages. Viking. $5.95.

Just as accountants use the double-entry system to order wildly diverse assets and liabilities, so this novel draws up a balance sheet on everyday life. Its hero, Christie Malry, scratches the essential formula on a London wall: "Debit them, credit me! Account settled!"

Christie starts by assessing minor annoyances. Being "virtually forced to join" a union at his job is worth -L-60, for example. To get due recompense for that and other slights, he destroys an important business letter, an act he values at -L-6. His accounts soon grow more complicated, and Malry's figures mount accordingly. To help make up for "socialism not being given a chance" (debit: -L-311,398), he dumps cyanide into a local reservoir, killing 20,000 Londoners (credit: -L-26,622.7). As the plot progresses, Christie's ledgers carry forward an ever larger debt that society owes him.

All this might sound grim in outline. But Author B.S. Johnson balances it with compassion and a humor that is alternately wry and ribald. Christie's adventures, whether in a bank, confectionery factory, or bed, are all double-entries. Action and futility, joy and grief, pique and nobility--everything counts, everything matters. Debit boredom, credit Johnson! A remarkable little book.

THE LAST NIGHT AT THE RITZ by ELIZABETH SAVAGE 245 pages. Little, Brown. $6.95.

"When Gay and I first met we talked a lot about death, as the young will, and were much moved by lines about sorrow and early loss--ah, many a time we wept for Adonais. But we don't talk about it much any more--I mean, what's to say?" The voice belongs to a New England woman, variously marked by love, marriage, friendship, drink and (of course) intimations of mortality that come, as Auden put it, like sounds of thunder at a picnic.

She is what used to be called a lady, though not so much of a lady as her best friend Gay. They both were young during World War II when college boys sang "You can easily tell she's not my mother, 'cause my mother's 49." This is a novel about then and now mostly in Boston, about women with character and brains and what happens to them, about marriage, about the wear and tear of living, about the manners and aspirations of a generation that endured to see its values--not well defended but well believed in--derided across the generation gap. The genre is women's fiction, and the book lapses occasionally into jargon and sentimentality. But in a very short compass, with extraordinary deftness, humor and a rueful shrewdness edging toward wisdom, it rises above genre to something not unlike small genius. "Nowadays, everyone knows a little something about the mind," thinks the lady, "though it doesn't seem to have helped as much as one could wish." And that's true too.

DOG TAGS by STEPHEN BECKER 307 pages. Random House. $6.95.

Stephen Becker's seventh novel contains the intentions of at least three books.

Script A: the classic American war novel. Becker introduces his protagonist Benny Beer, a New York tailor's son in a corporal's uniform, straggling alone across a World War II battlefield in Germany. Later, as Dr. Beer, Benny turns up in Korea, enduring 2 1/2 years in a Chinese prison camp. Here Becker is at his most persuasive as storyteller and moralist.

Script B: the classic Jewish novel, right down to the big wedding scene. Like most 20th century heroes, Benny is allowed to be epic only in bed. Alas, he picks a kind of Marjorie Morningstar.

Script C: the classic male-menopause novel. Hunkering down in a country setting very much like Becker's own western Massachusetts, Doc Beer becomes the energy-and concern-presence of the local hospital. But at 46 he feels trapped between needs and duties, lusts and considerations, shrinking ideals and lengthening fatigue.

What, finally, do all these plots have in common? Survival. As the lost soldier, as the wandering Jew, as the middle-class American who finds himself unexpectedly at the point of no return, Benny Beer is a combatant whose dog tags do less to establish his identity than to signal the fact that he is in a war to the death. As a 20th century man, Beer, even in peace, is a sort of P.O.W. Even at home he is a refugee Becker is given to spells of rhetoric and eccentric time skips. But in the end this very raggedness qualifies as a kind of verisimilitude.

THE FIRST DEADLY SIN by LAWRENCE SANDERS 566 pages. Putnam. $8.95.

Here, for fearful lowlanders, is the second crime novel in a year that characterizes mountain climbers as homicidal maniacs. (The first was The Eiger Sanction, an inferior but celebrated book by a pseudonymity called "Trevanian.")

Author Sanders cuts and piles clean sentences by the cord, stacks the cords by the carload, but then, alas, cannot refrain from using them all. His excessive literary creation is nevertheless an unparalleled time passer.

Daniel Blank is the evil alpinist, whose climbing is an ever repeated solo ascent of a mammoth phallic spire called the Devil's Needle. Goaded by a neurotic, not to say overly demonic young woman, Blank finds true fulfillment in splitting the skulls of strangers with his ice ax. The detective is Captain Edward X. Delaney, a shrewd cop with a need to bring order to the mess of life that almost matches Blank's compulsive twitches. Sanders, who has learned a lot since his 1970 The Anderson Tapes, handles ponderous scenes gracefully enough. He balances the action as Blank's mania foams more and more frequently and as Delaney's investigation quickens. The police work and even the climbing scenes are convincing. This book will probably peg the public's estimate of alpinists a degree or so below the current view of motorcycle racers and pornographers.

THE ALCHEMIST by LESLIE H. WHITTEN 368 pages. Charterhouse. $7.95.

Leslie H. Whitten is not just another run of the Hill Washington novelist. He is described as Columnist Jack Anderson's "top aide," which means he is one of the capital's powerful information brokers. He is also a shrewd and entertaining writer who, in The Alchemist, takes a break from the moral--sometimes bluntly alchemical--rigors of changing mud into political pay dirt.

It is a kinky story in which one can attend a Black Mass with a man in a human-skin cape, be privy to a grave robbing or pornographic home movie co-starring a U.S. Vice President, and (perhaps most obscene of all) listen to the tape of a Roman Catholic's bugged confession. Yet behind such lubricious props, The Alchemist is a brisk, semi-tough study of power and love, the intoxications of public life and non-negotiable private satisfactions.

The hero is Martin Dobecker, a nonpracticing lawyer and ex-husband in his early 30s, unusual only in that he is building an alchemist's furnace in his basement. He is diverted from these diversions by Anita Tockbridge, a 45-year-old Assistant Secretary of Labor still on her way up. When Martin becomes her speechwriter and lover, the author has a fine time singing the praises of older women as well as brushing off the old myth that it is the male who is driven by power and the female who seeks security and love.

Dobecker plunges into Anita's sumptuous web of sexual intrigue and petty corruptions. He plays at black magic, proves adept at dirty political infighting, and manages to enjoy an exhilarating lowlife, but in the end still convincingly comes through for the old-fashioned virtues of a straight marriage.

SURVIVE THE SAVAGE SEA by DOUGAL ROBERTSON 266 pages. Praeger. $7.95.

Frustrated by his life as a struggling dairyman in Scotland, Dougal Robertson did what many men only dream of. Trading his farm for Lucette, a 43-ft. wooden schooner, he set off on a round-the-world cruise. Eighteen months later and 200 miles west of the Galapagos Islands, his yacht was hit by killer whales and sank in one minute. Robertson, his wife Lyn, their three sons, Douglas, 18, and the twins Neil and Sandy, 12, and a Welsh student guest, Robin Williams, 22, were adrift on the Pacific.

Chances of survival looked bleak. Their inflatable life raft had a slow leak. There was no radio or compass. The food supply consisted of only a few oranges and lemons, some fortified bread and glucose packed aboard the raft.

After nine days they had to abandon the raft and squeeze aboard Lucette's 9-ft. fiber-glass dinghy. Using a makeshift sail and guided by stars, the dangerously overloaded craft headed north across the equator, where Robertson hoped to intercept the shipping lanes to Panama.

Robertson began to catch fish, using a homemade spear fashioned from gadgetry in his wife's sewing basket. Obliging sea turtles, apparently attracted to the dinghy in hopes of mating with it, added to the larder. They also enabled Lyn, a nurse by profession, to administer turtle-oil enemas to restore bowel movements. Finally, after 37 days at sea, the six castaways were picked up by a passing Japanese tuna boat.

To survive in the face of such great odds, they clearly needed more than just luck. Robertson had learned about the sea in his younger days in the merchant marine. His wife had essential medical training. They were also an extremely close-knit group with a will to live. Occasional fierce bickering did break out. In this bestselling book, Robertson's understated narrative compellingly records it all with suitable Scots reserve.

SAINT JACK by PAUL THEROUX 247 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $5.95.

On the whole, pimping probably should have as little to say for itself as possible, but Paul Theroux's newest novel makes a provocative case to the contrary. Jack Flowers, an overage American drifter beached in Singapore, tells the tale: the ribald apologia of a do-gooder who makes vice the arena of his somewhat special virtue. By pandering to other people's passions, Jack figures, he has saved "many fellers from harm and many girls from brutes." As for the act itself. Jack is old-fashioned enough to assume that everyone can agree on its proper dimensions.

But tastes change, even in the Singapore of the '60s. Jack discovers that exhibitionism, sadism and much, much more are in demand. When he refuses to pander to such tastes, he feels the first flush of sainthood. Theroux's title is teasingly ambiguous. Is it merely an ironic claim for Jack or a portentous comment on the corruption of the modern world? The book is clever, but its consistent facetiousness allows the author to avoid facing a basic fact: however one chooses to view it, in pimping there is always one party who gets a raw deal.

BEULAH LAND by LONNIE COLEMAN 495 pages. Doubleday. $8.95.

This fat package is about several generations of Southerners, black and white, living on a plantation called Beulah Land (1820 to 1861 et seq.), the name being borrowed from a quotation in Isaiah. It tells of a land truly flowing with milk, honey--and miscegenation. The author has been a playwright (Next of Kin) as well as a minor novelist, and his dialogue demonstrates an admirable ability to leave out the unnecessary clutter that so often drowns sofa-stuffed historicals in sobs and expostulations. His descriptive powers, though, do not rise to such simple things as a squirrel hunt or a day's lazy fishing in the local creek.

When Beulah Land's paperback rights were sold last year for a (then) near-record-breaking $800,000, the deal was made much of in the world of publishing which goes on forlornly hoping that cash and quality must somehow be linked. Coleman was naturally hailed as a new Margaret Mitchell. One might, as accurately, compare Gone With the Wind to War and Peace.

SAILS OF HOPE The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus by SIMON WIESENTHAL 248 pages. Macmillan. $5.95.

Was Columbus a Jew? Was his expedition to the Indies actually a search for the lost tribes of Israel? Such questions--never satisfactorily answered--are asked in this compact, fascinating, exasperating reinterpretation of Columbus' mission. The author is Simon Wiesenthal, head of the Vienna Documentation Center, which meticulously tracked down Adolf Eichmann as well as more than 1,000 other Nazi war criminals.

Wiesenthal brings a detective's breathless prose to his various hypotheses, but his message--that Columbus was a crypto-Jew or, more likely, a descendant of converted Jews--is anything but new. Spain's eminent historian and novelist Salvador de Madariaga covered the ground four decades ago.

Moreover, Wiesenthal, and this is a shocking surprise, often seems to be a careless detective. He moves from pure conjecture to assumed fact on the barest circumstantial evidence. But he does suggest with some conviction that the wealthy, Jewish-born Christians who financed Columbus' expedition for Ferdinand and Isabella had hopes of more than monetary return: if not the discovery of the lost tribes, perhaps at least a new land to which Jews could emigrate rather than convert to Christianity.

Wiesenthal is severely, and justly, critical of the monarchs, whose greed and overweening zeal did so much economic and spiritual harm both to the Jews and to Spain itself, crowning the Inquisition's persecution of Jews with the expulsion from the country of most of its best commercial minds. The final irony, of course, is that these two remorseless rulers, who financed Columbus' later expeditions with plundered Jewish wealth, unwittingly opened a New World where, in the centuries that followed, persecuted Jews would indeed find the haven they had sought so long.

HEARTLAND by SAUL MALOFF 279 pages. Scribners. $6.95.

At an institution significantly named the Donner Pass College for Women, the author pits a pair of middle-aged Eastern Jewish intellectual males against a covey of young Western Baptist extroverted females. To this year's Donner Pass Symposium for Distinguished Visitors come an obnoxious poet, Fox, and a weary, rueful professor, Isaiah Greene. Greene is at first charmed despite himself by the earnest and buxom simple-mindedness of the girls and their quaint collegiate rituals. What troubles him is the crassness of his odious colleague, the loudmouthed, girl-chasing Fox.

"I see you know about girls' schools. Ours anyway. They're really carnivorous, aren't they? Man-eaters. But that's what's wonderful about our girls," says Greene's hostess, a local Demeter, chattily. When she directs him to the college bookstore, he finds it peacefully short on texts and long on stuffed Teddy bears. Later the sight of some dusty relics in the school trophy room gives Greene a shiver. Still he is hardly prepared for the final evening, a candlelit, costumed rally in the chapel. There the frustrated Fox rashly taunts the girls about their antiSemitism, and promptly finds himself brutally assaulted by banal coeds turned bacchantes.

After Shirley Jackson, Ira Levin et al., Maloff can hardly rock the reader with such corny corn-god doings Yet he handles the shift from Teddy bears to ritual sacrifice with skill, tact and humor. He has also produced a fable for our feminist times.

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