Notable

DOG SOLDIERS by ROBERT STONE 342 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $8.95.

During the waning days of U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, a journalist named John Converse takes up with a bored American expatriate woman in Saigon. She invites him to buy an interest in three kilograms of pure heroin. Once this deadly package is safely Stateside and distributed to her friends, Converse will earn $40,000. He agrees, persuades an acquaintance, Ray Hicks, to smuggle the heroin to California. There, Converse's wife Marge will take possession and pay Hicks off.

The stark evil in this plan quickly flowers into nightmare. Two hoodlums pick up Hicks' trail the moment he arrives in Berkeley. He and Marge escape with the heroin, but when Converse gets home he walks into a trap. The thugs are not, as it happens, emissaries from the underworld but something worse: agents for a corrupt federal officer, bent on picking off the heroin for himself before staging a phony drug bust on Converse and his accomplices. The chase that follows is unforgettable.

Dog Soldiers is more than a white-knuckled plot; it is a harrowing allegory. The novice smugglers evade a sense of their own villainy through sophistry or indifference. Converse rationalizes that in a world capable of producing the horrors of war, "people are just naturally going to want to get high." Hicks concentrates on the exploit's challenge and itches to hurl his own aggressiveness into the void he imagines around him. Marge, already hooked on pills, accepts the heroin's arrival as fated for her.

Such equivocations blind them to the truth of their situation, which is also the novel's truth. The heroin is as shackling a possession as the bag of gold in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. Indeed, it is worse. Chaucer's three thieves at least thought that the gold was benign. Their catastrophe stemmed from disregarding Christian doctrine: radix malorum est cupiditas (greed is the root of all evil). Without a moral compass, Stone's characters cannot even plead ignorance. The irony that the heroin's value is rooted in its destructiveness does not escape them, but they cannot drop it. Its force has irradiated their world. They know of no good that will shelter them.

Competing Manias. This elemental tale is played out against a backdrop of the here and now. Heroin brings the Viet Nam War home to a sunny California filled with burnt-out cases from the '60s: deracinated hippies, faded gurus, old people driven mad by the gap between promise and truth. This Western strip of civilization has become a collection of competing manias, and its traces--rooming houses, motels, highways--are perched on the edge of primitive wilderness. Driving out of Los Angeles, Hicks comments on the quick change of scenery: "Go out for a Sunday spin, you're a short hair from the dawn of creation."

Novelist Stone's language is spare, constantly earning maximum effects with all but invisible efforts. A military career is summed up as years "of shining shoes and saluting automobiles." Much of the novel is dialogue, simultaneously as laconic and menacing as a scene by Harold Pinter.

Brooklyn-born Robert Stone, 37, spent time in New Orleans and San Francisco during the early '60s as an "active participant" in the counterculture. Some of these experiences spilled put in A Hall of Mirrors (1967), a surrealistic vision of a New Orleans rife with political paranoia. This second novel confirms the talent betrayed in A Hall of Mirrors and reveals added discipline. The book has its flaws, of course. It occasionally luxuriates in baroque bleakness for its own sake. For example, Converse's addled mother is gratuitously trotted on like a lab specimen. The characters' motives, seen through moments of fragmentary introspection, are not always adequate. Still, most of Dog Soldiers is as precise as the cross hairs on a rifle sight. With fearful accuracy it describes a journey to hell and pronounces an epitaph on a time that has not ended. qedPaul Gray

GUILTY PLEASURES by DONALD BARTHELME 165 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $7.95.

By now Barthelme's fictional landscape is familiar: a plot of undifferentiated clutter, hedged about with manicured non sequiturs. Though billed as nonfiction, this collage of pieces reads suspiciously like his past story collections--fragmented, humming with vaguely malevolent absurdities. This book's innocent pleasures stem from seeing how far the author can jump. The Consumer Bulletin Annual, for instance, hardly seems a bouncy platform for whimsy. Yet Barthelme somersaults from it into the tale of a hapless soul whose purchases consistently turn out to be substandard. "Consider the case of the bedside clock. 'Check for loudness of tick,' the Annual said. I checked. It ticked. Tick seemed decorous. Once installed in home, it boomed like a B-58."

Barthelme turns a parodist's ear to several deserving sources of modern noise. A mock scenario for a film in the manner of Antonioni blurs the line between significant ennui and utter vacuity: "Shot of nail kegs at construction site. Camera peers into keg, counts nails." A news story of four Bunnies, fired from the New York Playboy Club for losing their "Bunny image," provokes a case history: "Bitsy S., an attractive white female of 28, was admitted to Bellevue Hospital complaining that she could not find, physically locate, her own body."

In draping his motley over perishable structures, the satirist risks that they will some day collapse, taking his work down with them. A number of pieces in Guilty Pleasures are predicated on Richard Nixon, and their bite has already become gummy. One of the book's funnier stories (An Hesitation on the Bank of the Delaware) overcomes this loss through shameless slapstick. George Washington postpones his rowboat crossing until hearing whether Congress will continue to finance his personal extravagances. Speaking in an age when the printed s looked like an f, an aide informs the general that demands for his horse's accommodations have been rejected: "Both the Houfe Appropriation Committee and the Horfe Appropriation Committee bounced it back."

DOCTOR FRIGO by ERIC AMBLER 311 pages. Atheneum. $8.95.

Eric Ambler has never Bonded a thriller or Spillaned a spy story. In 15 ingenious novels of suspense and intrigue, his protagonists--in Ambler land, there are few heroes--are almost invariably decent, intelligent, well-bred men more or less unwittingly enmeshed in Gorgonian webs of political and financial conspiracy. Such a man is Ernesto Castillo, a reserved, dedicated physician who works in a hospital on an island in the French Antilles.

Known to his colleagues as "Dr. Frigo" (frigo is French argot for refrigerator or frozen meat), the Paris-trained doctor and narrator of the novel is a native of a Central American state where his radical, politically potent father has been lately assassinated--some say martyred. By whom? All sorts of suspects come to mind--among them the military junta that has just taken over the country--but Son Ernesto does not really care. In the course of the novel, cast in the form of a month-long diary, he confesses that his father was no more than a calculating politician caught in the middle of banana-republic crossfire. What really concerns Dr. Frigo is his profession, as well as making good on a complete renunciation of his father's political movement, which unhappily regards Frigo as its eventual leader.

Ambler unfolds his plot in the painstaking fashion of a chess grand master. In urbane, ironic style, he traces the slow, circumstantial entrapment of Ernesto Castillo in a successful attempt by his father's old party to seize power in the Central American republic.

None of this is as exciting as, say, A Coffin for Dimitrios, The Light of Day (which became the movie Topkapi) or Journey into Fear. Yet Ambler's latest fiction is not just Nembutal for insomniacs but a novel densely composed and deftly delivered.

THE ABBESS OF CREWE by MURIEL SPARK 116 pages. Viking. $6.95.

Not wisely, perhaps, but very well, Muriel Spark has written a takeoff on Old What's-His-Name, the electronics expert. The author (Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) lives in Rome and is not American but English. Nevertheless, news of our strange presidential downfall has reached her, and she has responded with a strange, stinging parody.

The masque is set in England, in the Benedictine abbey of Crewe. The old abbess has died, and after bitter but surreptitious campaigning, tall, autocratic Sister Alexandra has beaten dainty, lovable Sister Felicity in the election to choose a successor. Sister (now Lady Abbess) Alexandra has used, or has caused to be used, or has been in on the planning of the use of, or at any rate certainly has participated in the cover-up of the use of, some highly modern techniques for keeping in touch with her opponent's activities. In fact, she has bugged the entire abbey, including the poplars, and has piped all the dirt back to a monitor hidden in a jeweled statuette of the Infant of Prague. But now Sister Felicity, who has been excommunicated for seeing a Jesuit lover, has peached to the press. The public is confused but delighted, the politicians are baying, and the Vatican is raising hell.

The first fun in this sort of riddle is to see how far the similarities go. Sister Walburga and Sister Mildred, the Lady Abbess's co-plotters and hatchet nuns, are obviously Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Peripatetic Sister Gertrude, who phones in nightly from Reykjavik or Mombasa and, in a German accent, recommends the study of Machiavelli, is our very own Secretary of Snake. Sister Felicity seems to be an unstable amalgam of George McGovern and John Dean.

But how about Sister Alexandra? The Lady Abbess is said to be the descendant of 14 generations of English aristocrats. She is austerely beautiful, witty and devilishly good at poetry (when the tapes are transcribed, the documents are dotted with the notation: "Poetry deleted"). Crazed, yes; contemptuous of the rest of humanity, yes. But a parody of Whatchamacallem? Hardly.

The happy fact, of course, is that a send-up as elaborate as this takes on a delight of its own. The close tie to a real-life political absurdity eventually becomes a hindrance, but The Abbess of Crewe is a wonderful joke while it lasts.

THE PIRATE by HAROLD ROBBINS 408 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.95.

As Harold Robbins likes to point out, there is often more in a Harold Robbins novel than mere venery and violence. He shrewdly blends in topical interest to create a sort of nonfiction fiction. The Carpetbaggers (1961) offered thinly disguised views of Howard Hughes in his prime. The Adventurers (1966) traced jet-set life with the likes of the late Aly Khan. This latest timely extravaganza is a picaresque about a financial wizard who might just be modeled on Abdlatif Al Hamad, the oil sheikdom of Kuwait's money manager.

But with a twist. Robbins' hero, Baydr Al Fay, is really a Jew--a changeling, by Allah! At 40, he is one of the world's richest men, traveling constantly between banking centers to invest Arab oil revenues. Like other Robbins figments, Baydr is also an international satyr whose feats are topped only by those of his insatiable California-born wife. (Yes, Hollywood is at work on the movie.)

There are some insights into the oil cartel's doings; the author leaves no doubt at all that the Arabs are going to buy up the world if they can. Robbins' fans may find that prospect less galvanizing than the usual steamy prose: "Automatically her legs widened to encircle his waist."

THE SECRET GLASS by BERYL BAIN BRIDGE 152 pages. Braziller. $5.95.

This is the at first unpromising story of three English women living in crabbed intimacy in a Liverpool row house: two sisters, Nellie and Margo, plus their brother's daughter Rita, 17, who came into their care after her mother died. Unmarried Nellie's indignation colors their lives. Having sacrificed her own youth to the care of her mother, she holds Marge's brief, unsuccessful fling at marriage in daily contempt. Nellie sews dresses at home. Margo works in a munitions factory and drinks--when she can afford to--because she is fiftyish, fat and frustrated. The time is 1944 and the city is full of American soldiers: "Overpaid," as Rita's father (and everybody else) once said, "oversexed and over here."

Rita, naturally, falls in love with one of them. He is, naturally, a lout. But bad as he is, he makes Rita seem less listless and mousy. Margo vacillates between jealousy and the urge to tell Rita what favors she must grant lest she drive him off. Nellie seethes and tries not to notice. Nothing good can come of this, and nothing does.

Yet the novel's dreary lives are redeemed in the telling. Bainbridge's ear catches the tang of Liverpudlian argot ("My word, we do look a bobby dazzler"). The sisters' petty quarrels are small excursions of humanity in straitened circumstances. When Rita learns that her churlish soldier is illiterate, her dismayed brain is soon assuaged by her emotions. "Dear God, she thought, running up the cobbled alleyway, if he was that unschooled, he would need her, he would want to hold her in his life." Bainbridge unwisely changes her novel into a standard shocker on the final pages, but the ones that matter come earlier --shocks of recognition at the commonplace made extraordinary.

PORTERHOUSE BLUE by TOM SHARPE 219 pages. Prentice-Hall. $7.95.

If Wodehouse invented a plot and Waugh wrote a book round it, the result could hardly be more hilarious than this British mini-novel. The action involves the appointment of a feckless liberal politician as head of the ultra-conservative Porterhouse College at Cambridge University. When he proposes some changes--enrollment of women in the all-male college, for example--the faculty and staff staunchly resist.

Sharpe's characters are not so much etched in acid as flayed. The liberal college master glibly invents the slogan ALTERATION WITHOUT CHANGE. A longtime college servant muses, "Wog's in the Empire were different from wogs outside it and wogs in the Fox Club wasn't wogs at all or they wouldn't be members." There is a TV commentator whose carefully developed public image is that of a "lenient Jeremiah." Perhaps best of all, Sharpe presents a graduate student memorably beset by lust. Too diffident to ask for contraceptives in drugstores (where the clientele is mixed), he seeks them in barbershops (where contraceptives are also sold in Britain). But though he gets repeated "trims," he never gets a Durex. Is all this too British for U.S. tastes? Probably not; laughter knows no accent.

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