PORTERHOUSE BLUE by Tom Sharpe (Atlantic Monthly...

PORTERHOUSE BLUE

by Tom Sharpe (Atlantic Monthly Press: $8.95) Porterhouse, a venerable Cambridge college, is on the brink of disaster. On this point all the quirky British characters that populate this novel agree, though the reasons for impending doom are variously construed. A new Master has been appointed--Sir Godber Evans--who intends to effect change in the college; in his view, the ossified system that values the quality of the kitchen and the cultivation of rowing skills over academic achievement is outmoded. His plans, however, are strenuously opposed by the established hierarchy of the school. “We have our faults I daresay but they are not ones I would wish to see Sir Godber Evans remedy,” says the most conciliatory among the conservatives. The ensuing political battle is waged on such arcane battlegrounds as High Table and College Council and elicits such sage counsel as: “An appearance of open-mindedness has in my experience a tendency to disarm the radical left. They seem to feel the need to reciprocate.”

Tom Sharpe masters a staggering range of comedic effect, from the bawdy to the sublime. In an exchange fit for vaudeville, a student seeking advice on a sexual obsession finds himself compelled to describe his problems to the deaf chaplain through a megaphone. “Porterhouse Blue” has been filmed as a PBS miniseries.

LETTERS TO OLGA

by Vaclav Havel translated by Paul Wilson (Henry Holt: $16.95) Vaclav Havel, Czech playwright and leading member of the human rights group Charter 77, was arrested in Prague during demonstrations in January and sentenced to six months in prison--his third prison term since the 1968 invasion of his country by the Soviet Union. This volume is a collection of the letters he wrote to his wife from prison between June, 1979, and September, 1982. “Not only were (these letters) my only means of communication with the outside world,” he writes, “they were my only opportunity for some kind of creative expression. I was not allowed to write anything else.” As the prison authorities forbade letters discussing anything but family matters, Havel developed an encoded style, which allowed him to “smuggle more and more general comments into the letters.” Often, however, his meditative observations of simple activities--passages that could easily pass the censors--are the most revealing, poetic and affecting. He revels, for instance, in the pleasure of drinking tea: “I have become a fanatical devotee of Earl Grey, which the English tea lover scorns as a perfumed, old-maidish drink. . . . Tea, it seems to me, becomes a kind of material symbol of freedom here. When and how I make it is entirely up to me. Tea as a sign of private relaxation . . . is a substitute for the world of wine rooms, parties, binges . . . something you choose yourself and in which you realize your freedom in social terms.”

BANANA DIPLOMACY

The Making of American

Policy in Nicaragua 1981-1987

by Roy Gutman (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster: $9.95) The author, national security correspondent for Newsday, explains that when Ronald Reagan became President in 1981, there were in place no American policies hostile to Nicaragua. Although the United States had supported the Somoza regime, the economic and social ties between the two countries remained intact even after the 1979 Sandinista revolution. The Reagan Administration’s campaign against the Sandinistas therefore had to be made up from scratch. Formed without any specific strategy, the blanket anti-Communist mandate resulted in what might be called a Keystone Kops style of foreign affairs management. Reviewer Peter Davis characterized “Banana Diplomacy” as “fascinating and complex, resembling more closely the court intrigues around Louis XIV than the conventional policy development of an American presidency.”

FALL OUT OF HEAVEN

An Autobiographical Journey

Across Russia

by Alan Cheuse (Atlantic Monthly Press: $7.95) In 1986, novelist and NPR commentator Alan Cheuse traveled across the Soviet Union with his son on a sort of pilgrimage, seeking out the places his father, Philip Kaplan, had known. The story of this voyage is braided with tales of Kaplan’s romantic and adventuresome youth (he was in the Red Army Air Force), told in the first person. The third interwoven strand is the author’s recollections of a difficult father-son relationship in Kaplan’s far-from-heroic later life as an immigrant auto worker. Jonathan Kirsch’s review called “Fall Out of Heaven” “a celebration of the belated intimacy of father and son which is achieved, tragically but also triumphantly, only after death.”

SPIRIT SEIZURES

by Melissa Pritchard (Collier/Macmillan: $8.95) Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Carl Sandburg Literary Arts Award, “Spirit Seizures” contains short stories with a cast of broken, thwarted, despairing characters. Melissa Pritchard writes an unbalanced style, often lurching from first person to third within a story, and takes a merciless distance on her subjects, who observe each other closely but without connection or concern for each other. In “A Man Around the House,” a woman confined to a wheelchair recalls the man who lodged for a few days at their house: “His handwriting made me queasy. No man worth his salt writes with such fat female letters.” Later, when the suspicious character murders her sister and robs them, she muses detachedly: “I hope she had some happiness before he killed her anyway.”