Season's Readings

Once again, it's time to trudge out to the local department store, armed with an endless list of grand-nephews twice-removed, neighbors you've not seen all year, and assorted or-thodontists and hairdressers. You don't know anything about them, you don't care to know anything about them, but nonetheless you quest for that "tasteful" gift.

Head for the book department. Books are relatively harmless, and compact. What's more, they double as doorwedges for illiterate gift recipients. In a good bookstore, you can blow off your endless list in an hour.

Under the Tree

Fiction

Burger's Daughter, By Nadine Gordimer (Viking, $10.95): An elevating exploration of social commitment and the demands it places on a woman whose father has no doubts about his commitments in South Africa. She obviously has her doubts, and Gordimer portrays in heroic dimensions her attempts to carve out her own moral vision against the background of her father's consuming convictions. Gordimer's sensitive observations on South Africa's racial conflicts make for wrenching reading.

Cannibals and Missionaries, By Mary McCarthy. (Harcourt, Brace, $10.95): If Iran is still on the map by the time Christmas rolls around, the basis for this novel's plot is depressingly relevant. A committee of liberals sets off for Iran to uncover the sins of the Shah's regime. On the way they get hijacked and what follows is what critics recognize as McCarthy's most politically aware creation.

Darkness Visible, By William Golding. (Farrar, Straus Giroux, $10.95): Last time you read Golding you were in sixth grade: Teacher handed you Lord of the Flies; you read it, you staggered, and understood why the bully relished slamming the seesaw over your head during recess. You self-pityingly gazed in the mirror, shook your head and whispered "Piggy."

Piggy has undergone drastic transformations. The victim of society's malevolence is now a deformed orphan, charred in the London blitz, and tortured in true Dickensian from by a perverted teacher in the Foundlings School who enjoy's fondling. The dust jacket labels it a brilliant exploration of weirdness. It is.

The Executioner's Song, By Norman Mailer. (Little, Brown. $16.95): This is simply the most important book of the year. Norman Mailer '43 tells the story of Gary Gilmore, the professional convict and murderer who was executed in Utah in 1978, in a spare prose style pervaded with the dread of death. Everyone except Roger Rosenblatt liked it. Mailer claims he rediscovered America doing the book. He finally shows evidence that he can fulfill the awesome promise he created with the publication of The Naked and the Dead some 30 years ago, at the callow age of 27. He is now 56 and fat against his will; he's also the best writer in America. His book will be read.

Jailbird, By Kurt Vonnegut (Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, $9.95): At last, Vonnegut captures the essence of the Harvard Experience: Mid-Western chauffeur's son is packed off to Harvard by a stammering millionaire. He promptly becomes a Communist, serves time in the Roosevelt and Nixon camps, then lands in jail as a Watergate henchman. Praised as the best of Vonnegut's recent works.

Letters, By John Barth. (Putnam, $16.95): John Barth's endless epistolary novel takes five of the author's old characters and one new one and sets them to writing letters, usually not to each other but to dead people, themselves, imaginary characters, or the author. The letters go on forever through 700 pages, and though Barth's details follow an intricately laid-out pattern, there seems to be very little point to it all. Barth's writing remains contortedly witty, and alone gives Letters some value, but Barth might have shown some regard or consideration for his readers and restrained his verbosity.

The Right Stuff By Tom Wolfe. (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $12.95): Remember Project Mercury? Gus Grissom? John Glenn? Tom Wolfe's passionate chronicle of America's entry into the space age, The Right Stuff, brings back the memories--or introduces the subject--of the time when America braced for the Soviet threat from the sky and celebrated the heroes who fought that intergalactic cold war. More than that, Wolfe describes the code by which these men lived, the hell-raising, ass-kicking, flag-waving brotherhood of The Right Stuff. It's an exuberant and satisfying look at previously unexplored territory.

Non-Fiction

Albert Einstein. The Human Side. By Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman. (Princeton, $8.95): If all secretaries wrote books the shelves would be full of apalling revelations. But Einstein's secretary--with the aid of a former colleague--has only commendable and tender words for America's most apotheosized scientist. Your Grandmother or great-uncle Larry will love it.

D.H. Lawrence's Nightmare. The Writer and his Circle of Friends in the Years of the Great War. By Paul Delaney. (Basic, $15.95). Has Lawrence ever had a pleasant dream? Lawrence's wartime miseries are handled skillfully in this top-notch depiction of a full generation of British writers.

Diaghilev, By Richard Buckle (Atheneum. $22.95): For the same price you can take Amtrak--one way--to New York and see the Diaghilev exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But what then will you put on your coffee table? Though it makes a great living room conversation-piece, Buckle's work is also a splendid introduction to the Diaghilevian/magnificence on which much of Russia's cultural accomplishments in the first third of this century were based.

The Duke of Deception. Memories of My Father. By Geoffrey Wolff. (Random House, $12.95): His Pa is no Father Christmas. Wolff's father, Duke, is a con artist, a chronic debtor, a wanderer with illusions of grandeur, and an irresponsible parent to boot. A man only a son could love. Wolff's compassion is inspiring, though you may find his object of affection is less than deserving.

The White Album. By Joan Didion. (Simon and Schuster, $9.95): Written in Didion's usual cogent, vivid prose, this scrapbook of 1960s Americana is punctuated with insightful social commentary. But her series of epiphanies don't quite add up to the hoped-for unified masterpiece.

The Grab Bag

For the Reverent

Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness. By Marshall Frady. (Little, Brown, $12.95): Frady knows a winner when he sees one. Just take a look at the subject for his latest book, Wallace. His choice of good guys might not be yours, but the book is well crafted at any rate. Frady supports the27CrimsonAnthea Letsou