Craig's Life

DWIGHT CRAIG (398 pp.) -- Donald MacRae--Houghton Mifflin ($2.75).

With a little salt and some heavy editing, this latest Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship novel might have been a sort of Elmer Gantry of the U.S. teaching world. It tells the story of Dwight Craig, who, in the corn-country hick town where he hailed from, was known as Snookums. Then he was that nasty Mr. Craig who teaches high-school math. A few years later, he was the great, stately Doctor Craig, president of Western State University, an educational bureaucrat if there ever was one, from his cameo ring to his fruity smile.

Author MacRae, who teaches literature at Oregon's Reed College, spends about 400 pages trailing his quarry but never really nails the hide to the door. Nor does Author MacRae ever quite make up his mind whether he wants to write like Swift, Sinclair Lewis, James T. Farrell or Fanny Fern.

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