Bookends

THE CURRENT CLIMATE

by Bruce Jay Friedman

Atlantic Monthly Press

200 pages; $18.95

At 58, Harry Towns is a successful screenwriter, but not lately. His half- written play about the Spanish armada has run aground (the problem, he senses, is dramatic confrontation, or lack of it; a storm wrecked the Spanish fleet, so Sir Francis Drake and the Duke of Parma never set eyes on each other). His accountant, sounding increasingly detached, tells him that if he doesn't have a payday soon, he will have to sell his house in New York and move -- has it really come to this? -- to the green tedium of Vermont. He is reduced to pitching an idea for a TV series whose main character is a dog. But network biggies aren't much interested. Harry's timing is bad, which is to say, he is unfashionably old.

Ah, but the stability-impaired wordsmith we met 15 years ago in author Friedman's earlier novel About Harry Towns is still frisky, still foolish. Still capable, in fact, of careering into a writers' bar in lower Manhattan wearing, because of a recent mugging, only a sheet, and this early in a long evening. Friedman is funny and reliably irrelevant. Writing, he seems to be saying, is less dignified than the mail-order truss business, which is a truth on which to hang your hat.

KEEP THE CHANGE

by Thomas McGuane

Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence

230 pages; $18.95

Thomas McGuane has lost his way since the days of The Bushwhacked Piano and does not find it in his new novel, whose aimlessness raises thoughts of old ranch buildings fallen to ruin. His hero, Joe Starling, is a brilliant painter who no longer paints (hello there, Papa H.). Becalmed, then stirred by the faintest of internal winds, he returns from the staleness of the East Coast to Montana, where he has inherited a cattle spread. Here the author novelizes industriously, with small effect. Events occur; characters are brought to life, then enter, speak and exit; but Joe remains a not very interesting puzzle to himself and the reader. Only Montana itself is luminous, and for a few paragraphs here and there McGuane is still a marvelous writer: "The huge cottonwoods along the river had turned purest yellow, and since no wind had come up to disturb the dying leaves, the great trees stood in chandelier brilliance along the watercourses that veined the hills. Joe had to stop the truck to try to take in all this light."