Revolt at the Watercooler

OFFICE POLITICS by Wilfrid Sheed. 339 pages. Farrar, Straus. $4.95.

When the ego has been forgotten, all troubles end. That is the message of this quiet, cutting comedy of manners by the drama and book review editor of Commonweal.

Wilfrid Sheed's hero is George Wren, who has resigned a $13,000-a-year job at CBS, installed his wife, infant son, and burned-out TV set in a disastrous little apartment in Queens, and gone to work for peanuts as a junior editor of The Outsider, a journal of opinion that emerges urbanely from an office full of shrinking subscription lists and thwarted ambitions. Fellow Editor Fritz Tyler is a reformed marcher and sitter who ran out of ideas when he ran out of peace pamphlets. Fellow Editor Brian Fine is a pudgy drudge. Editor in Chief Gilbert Twining is a British-born, Cambridge-bred charmer who wields his red pencil as if it were the orb and scepter.

The natives do not like it. When a heart attack fells Twining, business and editorial staffers raise a rump regime. Memorandums are circulated and ignored; alliances fixed over luncheon are fractured over cocktails; policy is plotted in bedrooms. When the magazine goes to pot, Hero Wren wakes up to the difference between autocracy for the sake of doing up a job and anarchy for the sake of doing in the opposition. At the book's end, Twining returns, reduces the fatheaded opposition to its proper pinheaded proportions, and weary of it all, retires in favor of Wren.

Sheed's muted irony can make the most puerile antagonisms fascinating. The least puerile antagonist of all is also Sheed's most persuasive character: Gilbert Twining is an etched-in-elegance study of sweet British unreasonableness. In a prefatory note, Sheed writes that The Outsider resembles no magazine living or dead. It does not need to. Its mealy inside machinations will be persuasive to anyone who has ever held a paper cup beneath a watercooler.

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