MANY MASKSA Life of Frank Lloyd Wright...

MANY MASKS

A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright

by Brendan Gill (Ballantine Books: $12.95) Brendan Gill, a New Yorker writer of long standing, knew the iconoclastic architect in his later years and has written an engaging, intimate biography of this gifted “artful dodger. . . . (Wright) went on continuously inventing and reinventing himself, and the smiling, irresistible divinity that he impersonated in his seventies and eighties was but the latest of many similar masterpieces.”

Gill’s knowledge of architecture comes through in his discussion of Wright’s numerous phases, from the Prairie houses to the remarkable Falling Water, the Kaufmann home cantilevered over the Bear Run stream in Pennsylvania, to the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. But it is the details of Wright’s colorful life and persona, and Wright’s own perceptible voice, that make “Many Masks” an infinitely readable and enjoyable work.

CIGARETTES

A Novel

by Harry Mathews (Collier Books / Macmillan: $8.95) Allan’s been married to Maud for 26 years, but he becomes obsessed with Elizabeth when he first encounters her. For a week they meet illicitly every day, but work interrupts their idyll. When Allan calls Maud on the last day, he discovers that Elizabeth has moved into his house. Maud tells Allan, “Keep in touch. Someday I might invite you to stay too.”

Faithless, manipulative, unreliable, the characters of “Cigarettes” put their own interests first. The threads of Mathews’ multiple story lines are masterfully woven, each successive story revealing missing elements from a prior tale, combining and recombining like a kaleidoscope, with fragments falling into place with new configurations.

As Tom Clark wrote in these pages, “Cigarettes” is about “the built-in impossibility of human relationships. Our addictive drive to know and understand each other not only consumes us, Mathews seems to be saying, . . . but does so with as little real meaning as the consumption, one by one, of cigarettes from a pack: flaring glow, some smoke, and then gone.”

THE LOBBY

Jewish Political Power and

American Foreign Policy

by Edward Tivnan (Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster: $9.95) Tivnan begins his study of the powerful Israeli lobby when Theodor Herzl’s Zionist Dream became a reality and the state of Israel was born on May 14, 1948.

The book traces Israeli-U.S. relations from the Truman era to the present day and casts a critical eye on the emergence and growing power and intractability of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Conducting nearly 200 interviews, Tivnan has written a controversial assessment of Israel and the American Jewish community. In the new preface to the paperback edition, Tivnan reports that “for a decade, polls of American Jewish opinion have shown that Jews reject the Likud hard line two to one.” In a recent Los Angeles Times poll of Jewish attitudes toward Israel, “two-thirds of those surveyed favored some form of political accommodation with the Palestinians.”

The story he sets forth in “The Lobby” is “full of irony, not the least of which is that for a decade American Jewish leaders have been supporting in public Israeli policies with which they disagree in private, policies which in fact are endangering the Jewish and democratic character” of Israel.

DANCING AT THE

RASCAL FAIR

by Ivan Doig (Perennial Library/ Harper & Row: $8.95) Angus McCaskill, along with Rob Barclay, has left his native Scotland bound for America, destination Montana, to seek out Rob’s Uncle Lucas, who’s been a miner for seven years. When they reach Helena, Mont., they find not Lucas but history in the making: Montana attains statehood on that Nov. 8, 1889.

“Dancing at the Rascal Fair” is the story of three decades of early homesteading in the far reaches of northern Montana. Angus and Rob settle in Gros Ventre, Mont., where they raise sheep and where Angus falls in love with Anna--hopelessly and without requite.

Later, he marries Rob’s younger sister Adair, but he’ll never be a fully committed husband. Bitterness and betrayal drive a stake between the lifelong friends and alienate Angus from his son. Angus’ passion for Anna doesn’t diminish with time, even after her death; his obsession borders on the tiresome. The only hero here is the constant Adair, who continues to love stubbornly despite her husband’s undeservedness.

GRANDDAUGHTERS OF CORN

Portraits of Guatemalan Women

by Marilyn Anderson and Jonathan Garlock (Curbstone Press, Willimantic, Conn.: $19.95) Not merely a collection of stark black-and-white photographs, this moving record is an attempt “to illuminate”--for American eyes--”the hidden war in Guatemala--the third ring in the Central American circus of violence in which Nicaragua and El Salvador have been main events.”

The women whose portraits appear here are Mayan, poor and industrious, weaving beautiful fabrics on their back-strap looms as they have done for generations. In their faces, and in the autobiographical fragments that accompany their photographs, they tell of the savagery of civil war--of their own army’s brutality, of rape, of husbands and sons who have disappeared and whose fates they have no hope of knowing.