Bookends: Sep. 16, 1985

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