FICTION

MEMOIRS OF A CADDY by David Noonan (Simon & Schuster: $18.95; 173 pp.) . In 17-year-old Jim Mooney, a country-club caddie in a small New Jersey town, David Noonan has made a shrewd choice of narrator for a novel about the late 1960s. Jim is a social cut below the members whose golf bags he carries, but a cut above the itinerant professional caddies he drinks and plays cards with. He is poised between youth and adulthood, between his large Catholic family of Kennedy Democrats and the wider world that already threatens his older brother, Matt, a college dropout waiting to be drafted.

Jim’s hometown, too, is in transition: A place where George Washington’s army camped, it’s about to be engulfed by development oozing out from New York. Finally, the novel itself occupies central ground. It’s funny and sad, balanced between the turmoil of Jim’s youth and the soberness of retrospect. Any story told by a caddie is bound to be irreverent, but Jim can never forget, even in an age of rebellion, that his parents have raised him to “be sensitive to the feelings of others. . . . They were relentless about it and it paid off. . . . I was a nice guy.”

Noonan has structured this novel so that the older brother walks point for the younger. Matt breaks the ultimate country-club taboo by having an affair with the wife of a member who has come back from Vietnam crazed and violent, while Jim has a brief, hapless romance with a cheerleader. Matt himself is bound for Vietnam, while Jim only glimpses the rotten underside of the upper classes and feels American reality shift beneath his feet. The big issues have historical resonance, but it’s the smaller stuff--the comic portraits of caddies and golfers, a teen-ager’s search for love and meaning--that Noonan does best.