Notable

COMMEMORATIONS by HANS HERLIN

Translated by ERIC MOSBACHER

293 pages. St. Martin's Press. $8.95.

When Hans Berlin, 49, resigned as managing editor of Molden, one of Germany's largest publishing houses, he wanted to write a novel about Nazi skeletons in the national closet. With questionable taste, he also hoped to make it "entertaining." The result is this slick, ambiguous thriller. Hans Pikola, 50-year-old world-weary photographer turned hit man, stalks the even more world-weary war criminal, Karl Boettcher. The motive, revealed through flashbacks, provides romantic interest, undertones of incest--plus a gloss of social commentary in the form of industrial conspiracy in a Krupp-like organization. Result: a first novel that is already a bestseller in Germany.

Commemorations is a much better book than it has any right to be. Almost despite himself, Herlin has managed to create an indelible cast of minor characters. Among the dozen subtly etched survivors are Pikola's estranged wife Thea, an alcoholic who was once "the most touchingly unsuccessful singer who ever appeared on stage to entertain German troops," and the narrator's father Ludwig, who earned his living during the war by printing postcards of soldiers who had won the Iron Cross. All the characters are revealed as victims, afflicted by memories of what they suffered or what they inflicted. But there is one more victim of this curious book: the author himself. Berlin's "entertaining" plot is a kind of strategy for evading the very horrors he has resurrected. The price for that evasion is the Commemorations that is, instead of the major novel that might have been.

TERMS OF ENDEARMENT

by LARRY McMURTRY 410 pages. Simon & Schuster. $9.95.

Houston-based Aurora Greenway, 49, is a transplanted New Englander and an AstroTurf widow. On the rebound from 24 years of marriage to the pallid Rudyard ("A plant could not have been easier to relate to, or less exciting"), Aurora gaily assembles and mistreats a colorful retinue of suitors including a retired general, an Italian tenor and a bashful oil millionaire who lives in his white Lincoln. She views their constant proposals of marriage skeptically. "Men have never distinguished themselves for sexual fidelity," she says. "The poor things have short attention spans."

Although Aurora's polished dialogue is not without wit, she never sounds much better than the star of a road-company Importance of Being Earnest. As he has demonstrated in novels like The Last Picture Show, Author McMurtry feels most at home with Texas natives, and the odd characters who orbit around his highfalutin heroine regularly upstage her. In the book's best scene, for example, a jealous and not-too-bright husband tries to find his wife at the J-Bar Korral by driving through it in a truck. Aurora's plain, long-suffering daughter is as poignant as her mother is flashy, and her grim fate at the novel's end seems out of keeping with all the earlier slapstick. Yet McMurtry's skill and compassion all but hide his incongruities.

MORTAL STAKES by ROBERT B. PARKER 172 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $6.95.

A Boston Red Sox official suspects that Marty Rabb, the team's ace pitcher, may be throwing games as well as baseballs. He hires Spenser ("S-p-e-n-s-e-r, Like the English poet"), a local sleuth more skilled at cracking cases than cracking wise. His fee, Spenser announces, is the traditional "hundred a day and expenses. But I'm running a special this week; at no extra charge I teach you how to weave a blackjack." In spite of such feeble jocundities, Spenser easily gets the goods on the errant pitcher. The interesting trouble begins when he suffers an attack of brotherly love and decides to save Rabb's career.

Mortal Stakes is Spenser's third case, and Author Robert B. Parker (TIME, Feb. 10) again proves to be a skilled blender of old formulas. Spenser and his booze, drab office and compliant women may be by Dashiell Hammett out of Raymond Chandler, but they are not a whit less entertaining for all that. For the jaded, Parker also throws in sly literary allusions. Why else pilfer from William Blake to describe the "fearful symmetry" of an apartment-house corridor? Parker's chief attribute this time out may be inspired timing. The 1975 Red Sox enjoyed that championship season. In less happy summers, the notion of the team intentionally losing games would have set off bitter laughter all along the Charles.

GROWING UP RICH by ANNE BERNAYS 343 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.

Growing Up Rich is Anne Bernays' David Copper field--with a contemporary difference. "The Seeley School was my blacking factory," says Sarah Agard Stern, the plump, shy 14-year-old daughter of authentically beautiful people. Her mother, "Fippy" Baum, though "100% Jew, has a Scandinavian forehead, an Episcopalian nose, a Beverly Farms accent and a debutante slouch." Her stepfather Freddie is an intellectually aspiring publisher of books so tastefully erudite that no other firm would touch them. Freddie and Fippy assure Sarah that "a Seeley education is your passport to the world"--the immensely wealthy world, that is, of Upper East Side New York in 1948, a world whose only moral imperative is "Thou shall not be tacky." Born with a silver spoon in her craw, Sarah does not want to measure out her life in "day after day of marzipan, silk velvet, Steuben glass and butter balls."

Tragedy interrupts and redirects the process of simmering rebellion. Suddenly orphaned, Sarah is packed off to the polar opposite of her gilded world. In Brookline, Mass., she takes up a life of quiet desperation in the household of her guardian Sam London, an unkempt old radical who had served as her father's literary Svengali. The transition from haul monde to ghettoized middle class, from circumspect to unabashed Jewishness, is at first insupportable. But Sarah is gradually melted by the warmth that emanates from the Londons' hopelessly undisciplined kitchen. Her taste for veal Marsala and marzipan gives way to a yen for Butterfingers and pastrami, and this otherwise brilliantly written, hard-edged novel of adolescence ends with a long slide home. It is an oddly sentimental conclusion to a bitter book, and precisely the kind that Dickens would have approved.

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