Mixed Fiction

SEIZE THE DAY, by Saul Bellow (21 I pp.; Viking; $3), is a collection of four stories and a one-act play by the author of the 1953 bestseller, The Adventures of Augie March. In his latest adventures, Author Bellow suggests that money is not only the root of all evil but also of all plot. "Money," muses one character who doesn't have any, "surrounds you in life as the earth does in death." Tommy Wilhelm, the fortyish hero of the title story, has a mind as empty as his pocket. Unemployed, dunned by his estranged wife, rebuffed by his wealthy father, he has hypnotically turned over his last $700 to Dr. Tamkin, a swindler so transparent that even Tommy sees through him. When the money vanishes Tommy reverts to childhood, finds release by sobbing hysterically at a stranger's funeral.

In Looking for Mr. Green, a welfare investigator ranges endlessly through a Chicago slum trying to give a relief check to a crippled Negro. In The Gonzaga Manuscripts, a dilettante fruitlessly combs Spain trying to buy the lost manuscripts of a dead poet. The stories suffer particularly from the fact that the leading characters are usually the dullest people in them. The reader of Seize the Day could do with less of regressive Tommy Wilhelm and more about rascally Dr. Tamkin, whose compelling eye and incessant tongue carry the story bracingly forward whenever he is onstage.

THE DOVES OF VENUS, by Olivia Manning (313 pp.;Abelard-Schuman; $3.50), pull the chariot of the goddess of love, according to classic mythology. The doves of British Author Manning's novel are yoked to illusions about love. Dove No. 1 is a breathless 18-year-old country girl named Ellie Parsons whose ideal of love is losing her virginity to Quintin Bellot, a middle-aging charmer-about-London. Dove No. 2 is married to Dove No. I's Prince Charming, but Petta Bellot has always operated on the theory that variety is the spice of love. Since Quintin believes that "we are all victims, one of another," both girls have a rather unhappy time of it. Quintin decamps, and Ellie carries a torch, but Petta promptly produces a hack writer as a consolation prize^--a has-been as a man of letters but a still-is as a lover.

These goings-on carry the girls to the unstoppered hell of arty cocktail parties and the drawing-room purgatories of upper-caste Britons living beyond their unearned incomes. The book's brittle, so-weary-of-it-all lament, which only a Bea Lillie could salvage, too often turns the glint of champagne sparkle into ginger-beer fizz.. But Author Manning has an unerring wit that probably comes unforced to a contributor to Punch, and she sees to it, at novel's end, that each of the doves has been properly plucked.

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