Bookends

THE GRASSHOPPER TRAP

by Patrick F. McManus

Holt, Rinehart & Winston

214 pages; $13.95

Wife to husband, after a close call during a drive in the boondocks: "What would you have done if you'd hit that skunk with the car?" Husband to wife: "The only decent thing. I'd have stopped and buried it in the ditch. I might even have buried the skunk along with it." There are readers who will claim they saw that punch line coming a mile away. These people are almost certainly unaware of Patrick F. McManus or the monthly humor column, "The Last Laugh," that he writes for Outdoor Life. A great pity.

Herds of country cognoscenti await McManus' appearance in magazines and books (Never Sniff a Gift Fish, 1983). The 30 pieces assembled here run a bucolic gamut of outdoor misadventures. The author recalls his encounter with an inept wilderness guide: "Once he got us so lost I resorted to firing three shots in rapid succession. But the light was bad and I missed him." At other times McManus offers addled expertise. He tells new husbands how to build up a gun collection without attracting the attention of their wives. Hint: get the little woman to stop counting rifles and start thinking "all those guns." He also offers some badly needed collective nouns, based on the pattern of an exaltation of larks: a sulk of unsuccessful fishermen, a whiff of skunk trappers, a cramp of camp cooks. All of which should beguile McManus' growing cackle of devotees.

FIRST LOYALTY

by Richard Lourie

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

405 pages; $17.95

This thriller carries heavy baggage: encomiums from Nobel Laureates Saul Bellow and Czeslaw Milosz. But Richard Lourie is equal to the burden. First Loyalty has a compelling cast and a labyrinthine plot that twists from Siberia to the Bronx. Perhaps the most odious individual is the exiled dissident poet Evgeny Shar. To him crime is just "politics without the excuses." His nemesis, Writer David Aronow, scrapes by translating "the endless memoirs of people from countries where nothing ever worked out well." KGB Colonel Anton Vinias, responsible for instigating Western soccer riots, believes reality is simply "documentary footage, crying out for montage." In the end there is nothing to cheer for; avaricious superpowers widen the cold war gulf. Lourie, a professional translator from Russian and Polish into English, knows his turf well, and his novel works as polemic and page turner. It chills in any language.

TRIO

by Aram Saroyan

Simon & Schuster; 256 pages; $15.95

They were a type of American female now all but extinct, young women who aspired, through beauty and wit, to marry rich, famous and fascinating older men. Each got her wish. After a false start with a Hollywood agent, Gloria Vanderbilt made a better (although also temporary) match with Leopold Stokowski. Carol Marcus married William Saroyan and Oona O'Neill discovered lifelong romance with Charlie Chaplin. As this novelistic account makes clear, the three women were as interesting as the men they married. Aram Saroyan, son of the ill-fated Saroyan-Marcus marriage, takes them from their schoolgirl days in pre-World War II Manhattan to 1983. The best scenes are perverse and poignant, like the one between Jackie Coogan, who was a child star in a Chaplin film, and the Little Tramp, who seems befuddled by age. "Charlie," says Oona, "it's Jackie Coogan, 'the kid,' darling." Chaplin whispers back: "Stop poking me. He wants residuals."

BORN TO WIN

by John Bertrand,

as told to Patrick Robinson

Morrow; 385 pages; $19.95

On Sept. 26, 1983, the 12-meter yacht Australia II crossed the finish line off Newport, R.I., capturing the America's Cup and ending 132 years of U.S. sailing supremacy. Americans were astonished when John Bertrand, an unknown naval engineer, steered his boat to victory. But those familiar with the Melbourne skipper were not surprised: Bertrand's great-grandfather had helped build Sir Thomas Lipton's towering boats for early 20th century America's Cup competitions. As Bertrand admits in Born to Win, he relied as much on gamesmanship as yachtsmanship. He called the boat's new forward-slanted keel his secret weapon, and only now confesses that the keel was a fake, intended only to unnerve the competition. He employed a sports psychologist to whip his crew into an athletic frenzy, then made his Ahabian prediction: "We are going to sail our boat as it has never been sailed before." So they did, and every pitch and yaw of the great race has been accurately charted in a good-humored account that manages to be simultaneously boastful and winning, in every sense of the word.