Notable

AFTER LONG SILENCE by Michael Straight Norton; 351 pages; $17.50

Upstairs in the nursery, little Michael Straight plays with his fire engine. Below, in his family's Fifth Avenue town house, a guest, Joseph Conrad, reads from one of his novels. In this tortured memoir, Straight, 66, wonders what work the author recited. He rather hopes it was Under Western Eyes, the story of Razumov, a young man who betrays an older student and loses his soul in the process.

From time to time, Conrad's name is loudly dropped in order to underline the supposed resemblance between Razumov and Straight. But there are more pertinent names, among them Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Sir Anthony Blunt. Straight, the son of wealthy Americans, meets most of them at Cambridge, where, smitten by brilliant, romantic chatter about revolution, he joins a small Communist cell. Back in the U.S., he signs on at the State Department, slipping his memorandum about Hitler's armaments to a Soviet contact before dropping out of espionage and politics to write novels and occasional magazine pieces. One afternoon in 1963, Straight makes a full confession to the FBI. The revelation leads to the exposure of Blunt, although he is not publicly unmasked for more than a decade. When Sir Anthony meets the finger man he says blandly, "We always wondered how long it would be before you turned us in."

The spies apparently never took Straight very seriously, and it is equally difficult for the reader to grant the author much moral stature. Straight's belated mea culpa has the character of an afterthought: treason had long since been done. Through this self-dramatizing reminiscence, another book of Conrad's suggests itself. A profound pity the author did not learn from Lord Jim, with its irrefutable observation: "Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory."

TEMPLE by Robert Greenfield

Summit; 411 pages; $15.95

The name is new, but the farce is familiar: a young man returns home to rage against the Jewish culture he left behind. Portnoy's Complaint is the prototype; Bruce Jay Friedman's A Mother's Kisses and Mordecai Richler's St. Urbain's Horseman bear a strong family resemblance. So does Robert Greenfield's Temple, but the author's energy is so abundant that the entire genre seems revitalized. The protagonist, Paulie Bindle, is a Harvard Square dropout who quits a bookstore job to journey back to his Jewish roots in New York. Those roots no longer run deep. The women of the community find more solace at Toni's beauty salon than they do at the synagogue, where the rabbi spreads false rumors of an Arab attack on Israel so that the congregation will give larger donations. A tape machine secretly records the pledges so that promises will be kept. The vulgarities of the temple's Las Vegas Night, of gossip and conflict are mercilessly observed by Paulie, who overhears everything and forgives nothing. More affected by the songs of James Brown than the sermons of the rabbi, Paulie ends his quest at a church, not as a convert but simply as another kind of refugee, haunted by an ethos he can neither take nor leave.

Greenfield is something of a tape recorder himself, registering every inflection and hypocrisy. Paulie mimics an indulgent father: "Clothes? Certainly, darling. A nice, expensive, out-of-town college? Name one, sweetheart, and I'll get you right in. A diaphragm? Of course, precious. I'll ask your mother to pick one up for you on the avenue while she's out shopping." Greenfield's oscillation between third and first person is singular without being wholly successful, but he manages that most difficult recipe: a blend of acrimony, humor, regret and hope. Soothing it's not; memorable it is. - This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.