Good Spring Tonics

Novels Probe Politics and Publishing

By Wes Lawrence, Book Editor

if you are looking for some good entertainment as an antidote to all the problem fiction, let me tell you about two novels I have read this last week with real pleasure. The first, a novel by Joseph Rosner titled Public Faces in Private Places (Delacorte Press, $4.95), is a hilarious and bawdy spoof of Washington politics and especially of those agencies whose duties involve national and presidential safety.

THE ACTION takes place on the two or three days before a presidential election, days on which the job of Ashton, a security agent, in protecting the president's son, is complicated by the fact that the young man, who "depended on women the way other people depend on public utilities," has fall' en for a beautiful girl on the staff of the Russian embassy.

It is expected to be a tight election, so that if son Raymond is caught in the arms of his Russian beloved it will be all over for his father.

Mack Sennett never produced a funnier chase than Rossner has in describing the war of wits between Ashton and Raymond and the press, and it will be a matter for regret if Hollywood does not grab this one.

BUT FUNNY as it is, there are some questions raised that are worth consideration such as, for example, how comes it that it is the homosexual we worry about in the State Department while it is the hetero-

sexual who is victimized by the lovely feminine spies? My second offering is The Making, by Sherman Baker (World, $5.95). This is an informative as well as an entertaining novel about book publishing by an author who knows every angle of the business from personal experience.

Hero of the novel is Alex Godowski, vice president and editor-in-chief of a respected family publishing firm, and the book is the story of his struggle to maintain the firm's high standards in the face of one of those slumps which drives the son of the founder to cheat his authors and cheapen the output in an efort to restore prosperity.

ALSO INVOLVED are

matters of sexual morality, and although it may annoy

some admirers of current fiction to be informed that there is still such a thing and that its recognition or disregard can make or break a man, I personally found the idea rather fascinating. There are some lovely and some not so lovely ladies in the novel.

Baker knows how to tell a good story, and unless you insist on fiction that is a tour of the subconscious or a pornographic treatise, you

should enjoy an evening with The Making.