Bookends

DIFFICULTIES WITH GIRLS

by Kingsley Amis

Summit; 276 pages; $18.95

Patrick and Jenny Standish have just moved into a modern apartment complex south of the Thames in London (faithful Amis readers will recall the courtship of these two as recorded 29 years ago in Take a Girl Like You). Patrick has stopped being a Latin teacher and now works as an editor at a publishing house. After nearly eight years of marriage, he is proving no match for the temptations of swinging London in the '60s. His difficulties with girls involve an inability to resist them. A new neighbor, Tim Valentine, confesses to another sort of problem: an initial enthusiasm followed immediately by unmanning apathy. He has decided that he must be homosexual. Patrick's tasks include talking Tim out of this idea and keeping his own marriage from foundering. The author trots out these carnal misadventures with his usual comic flair. Patrick is a typical Amis hero, a young fogy who finds much of the world exasperating. Beneath the crackling surface, though, lies a more somber tale of people behaving badly and, in most cases, finally coming to their senses.

WORKING DAYS: THE JOURNALS OF THE GRAPES OF WRATH

by John Steinbeck; edited by Robert DeMott; Viking; 180 pages; $18.95

Published 50 years ago, The Grapes of Wrath has taken its place among the handful of American novels (Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Jungle) that changed public attitudes and policy. To mark its golden anniversary, the book's original publisher has issued a new edition (Viking; $25) and also the journals Steinbeck kept during the five months (five months!) it took him to complete the 200,000-word manuscript.

The author, then 36, used these private notes as warm-up exercises for the day's work. He gave himself pep talks: "This must be a good book. It simply must. I haven't any choice." To readers today, the fascination of this document rests in its portrait of an artist at the peak of his skills. Steinbeck's outrage at the mistreatment of Dust Bowl migrants in California, which he had witnessed firsthand, fused with his storytelling abilities to produce the most powerful book he would ever write. It won him the Pulitzer Prize and contributed mightily to his Nobel Prize in 1962. Both exhilarated and exhausted after finishing the book, Steinbeck wondered whether he would ever write so well again: "That part of my life that made the Grapes is over."

WORDSTRUCK

by Robert MacNeil

Viking; 230 pages; $18.95

In this charming memoir, half of PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer news team deftly links his early biography to the words and books he learned, to connections made. Born in Montreal but raised mostly in Halifax, Robert MacNeil was the son of a seagoing Mountie (in Canada's equivalent of the Coast Guard) and a Nova Scotian mother who delighted in reading aloud to her sons. MacNeil's first nonbaby words were "gin fizz" -- the name of a teddy bear. He recalls being amazed, on a rare trip aboard his father's corvette, that sailing terms derived from Viking days (coxswain, starboard) still have a defining role in modern navies. MacNeil's memories of Nova Scotia have what D.H. Lawrence called a "spirit of place." In the book's best pages, one can almost whiff the salty tang of fog descending on proud, poky Halifax as winter comes.

SHARE OF HONOR

by Ralph Graves

Henry Holt; 454 pages; $19.95

The winds of war whip briskly through this novel of the Philippines just before and during the Japanese occupation. Ralph Graves, who knew the islands as the teenage stepson of the U.S. High Commissioner during 1939-41, re- creates the prewar colonial atmosphere, the swift arrival of the enemy after Pearl Harbor and the struggle to survive until General Douglas MacArthur's triumphant return. Graves, the last managing editor of the weekly LIFE and a retired editorial director of Time Inc., deploys a diverse cast of characters (American, Filipino and Japanese) whose fates are joined in a narrative that combines the observations of good journalism with the emotional impact of perceptive fiction.