The Best and The Brassiest

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE ADVENT OF FREDERICK GILES by JOSIAH BUNTING III 246 pages. Little, Brown. $6.95.

In his first novel The Lionheads, Josiah Bunting drew heavily on his experience as a U.S. Army officer in Viet Nam to describe how ignorance and careerism were undermining the military. In The Advent of Frederick Giles, set in a tranquil English town thousands of miles from the nearest rice paddy, Bunting proves himself a resourceful sapper in the perennial and usually undeclared war between social classes.

Bunting employs the principal tactic of class war, the ambush. His unsuspecting victim is an American named Mark Adams, a member of that amorphous elite loosely known as the Eastern establishment. A graduate of Princeton circa 1960 and a holder of a gentlemanly undistinguished degree from Cambridge, Adams has also served in Viet Nam as an Army officer with a certain detached distaste. Both he and his wife Marjorie, a diplomat's daughter from north-central New Jersey's horsy country, wear their status with the proper casual confidence. For Adams, at least, this confidence is rudely shaken when he takes his family for an extended stay at the Rufus Arms, "the least pretentious and most expensive hotel in Lawnsmere," a pseudonymous Surrey town only a Times-crossword-puzzle by train from London. As Mark tells it in a sadder-but-wiser voice, the plan was to stash his family in the countryside while he commuted to the city to research a book about Sir Gordon Sandstone, a hero of the Boer War.

Ugly American. It is an unpressing, genteel project that barely disguises the truth: Adams does not know where his life is going, and he does not much care for anything. It is a truth that is all the more painful because he is forced to face it by a man whom he feels is his inferior in every way. Frederick Giles of Winnebago Terrace, Ill., graduate of Kansas State and World War II veteran who wears an American flag tie clasp, is also staying at the Rufus Arms. He would be everyone's idea of a silent American, except that he spends his evenings at the hotel bar drinking heavily, flapping his right-wing opinions wildly and baiting Adams about his own tepid liberalism.

Adams, whose natural reaction is to be politely condescending, grossly underestimates Giles. Though Giles makes a fool of himself in public, he works stealthily behind the lines by befriending Marjorie and the children. While Adams is off researching and occasionally sharing the girl friend of an old Cambridge classmate, Giles and Marjorie become quite chummy. Just how far they go is kept calculatedly unclear by the author at the book's climax. In doing so, Bunting underscores the point that for Adams to be cuckolded by a social inferior is bad enough, but not to be sure may be even worse.

Josiah Bunting, a former Rhodes scholar, taught history at West Point until he resigned a major's commission to become president of Briarcliff, a small college for women on New York's Hudson River. He plots Mark Adams' unsentimental education with the synchronized precision of a military operation. In addition to this main objective, he also assaults a number of targets of opportunity. There are flash backs about upper-class courtship and wedding rituals, a peek into office politics at U.S. Army training bases, and a particularly biting set piece about affluent Connecticut Episcopalians singing We Shall Overcome at a memorial service for Martin Luther King.

Perhaps because he has had so much experience packing duffel bags, Bunting gets a great deal into fewer than 250 pages. He has an old-fashioned social novelist's knack of sketching characters and setting scenes. But he also puts a fresh wrinkle in the old tale of a cold sophisticate getting burned by the rube. Yankee versions customarily make the rube goodhearted. But Adams and Giles both represent a failure of what Americans like to think of as an egalitarian society. Adams' understated, institutionalized arrogance and Giles' blustering, rude arrogance are not different in substance. Only in Style. -R.Z. Sheppard

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