Books: Notable: Aug. 30, 1982

SOMEONE ELSE'S MONEY

by Michael M. Thomas

Simon & Schuster; 511 pages; $14.95

The worlds of art and high finance have sometimes seemed inseparable over the past two decades. If the dogged substitution of price for quality has defied good sense and good taste, fiction has been a major beneficiary. Yale-educated Michael Thomas, who at 46 has had successful careers in both milieus (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lehman Brothers), has distilled from the darker lunacies of these worlds a novel of crackling humor and mordant observation. Its bigger-than-Barron 's protagonist is Oilman Buford ("Bubber") Gudge IV, who has been content to nurse his multibillion-dollar fortune in the Texas Panhandle until lust and vengeance propel him forth like a plague of pissants.

Gudge has two serious problems: he is dying of cancer and he is totally at the mercy of his new wife Caryn, a dexterous Texas tart who has decided that she wants nothing less from Bubber than the most dazzling collection of Renaissance art left in private hands. Unfortunately, the pictures are not for sale. In addition, the dying man is hell-bent on getting even with a half-sister who once cheated him and a Senator who once humiliated him on TV. Gudge's revenge involves a vast investment swindle that will administer America (in the author's words) "a convulsive, purifying shock at the core of its folly," i.e., Wall Street.

This assault on the free enterprise system is devastatingly successful, and so, despite its complexities, is the author's handling of the caper. Its most memorable victim is Granada Masterman, Gudge's lumpy half-sister, who has built a door-to-door beauty-products business into an army of 14,000 Masterwomen that resembles more a religious cult than the Avon sorority. Granada aims to buy her way to social acceptance via the stock market and art patronage, and Thomas' depiction of the scramble of ars gratia ego is both deeply knowledgeable and unnerving.

If the novel has a hero, it is Nicholas Reverey, an honorable, fortyish art dealer who has an eye as acute as the late David Carritt's. The love interest is provided by Jill Newman, who manages to churn out gossip for a rag called That Woman! as well as an authoritative column for a financial weekly. As in his first novel, Green Monday, Thomas has assembled a picaresque cast of cutthroats, poseurs, cultural pimps and likable rascals. But the author's true love is for art, the canvases, the places and the people, of which he writes at times with the clarity and luster of a Rubens ... or the school of.

BACK TO BASICS

by Burton Yale Pines

Morrow; 348 pages; $13.50