Notable

EVENING IN BYZANTIUM

by IRWIN SHAW 368 pages. Delacorte. $7.95.

Irwin Shaw's recent characters seem to come in three possible shapes: flat, angular or round. They range from the looking" to "sharp-faced, the merely balding, "round, mahog insignificant-any-tanned [and] smiling." Somewhere in between, you will find Jesse Craig, the 48-year-old protagonist of Shaw's latest bestselling novel. Craig's last two films bombed for $8,000,000; his estranged wife has grown accustomed to his checkbook; his mistress may be getting bored with his body. So Craig does the only logical thing: he flees to the Cannes Film Festival to mend his fortunes.

He is there also, he tells himself, "to save my life." But his first-aid program calls for steady transfusions of alcohol, a spicy diet of youthcult flicks and, in desperate moments, mouth-to-mouth sessions with a girl reporter. Craig also broods about his past (he has been an s.o.b. to a lot of little people) and agonizes over his future. His soul-searching is sup ported by a pulpy cast that includes his own Antonioni-bred daughter, his Irish agent, an embittered ex-screenwriter, an aging movie mogul, several leering French waiters and -- since this is Cannes -- a falling-down-drunk film critic.

Craig's women are portrayed as cunning, deceitful and expendable. Leave them for a few hours and they feel they have been deserted. Craig likes to drop big names, from Bobby Kennedy to Ingmar Bergman. At one point, who should appear in a Cannes restaurant but Pablo Picasso, "bull-like vitality ... great naked head" and all. Forced to look at Shaw's hero from a painter's perspective, Picasso sees "a lonely fellow human being moving painfully across an empty canvas." More than likely he spotted a slightly stale, rich novelist doodling on a tablecloth.

YOUNG WINSTON'S WARS: THE ORIGINAL DESPATCHES [sic] OF WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, WAR CORRESPONDENT, 1897-1900

Edited by FREDERICK WOODS 350 pages. Viking. $8.95.

The reporter is a young subaltern, connected and surpassingly self-confident. He charges with the 21st against the dervishes at Khartoum, makes his way alone through the to the Nile, escapes from a Boer camp into an eight-day chase. Apart from money and fame, his principal aim in these dispatches is to win each breakfast reader of the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post to his own vision of colonial expansion. This is the age of Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain. The exuberant correspondent foresees a "brave system of state-aided -- almost state-compelled -- emigration" to "regions of possibil ity" where "the great-grandchildren of the crossing-sweeper and the sandwichman sport by the waves . . . sing aloud for joy in the beauty of their home and the pride of their race."

The young Churchill duly records the Crown's triumph in the Sudan over "these savages with their vile customs and brutal ideas." But in South Africa, he praises "the stubborn, unpretentious valour of the Boer." British set backs make him fudge, apologize, sermonize. He is capable of humor, though. "Islam," he writes, "does indeed teach man how to die, [but] dying is a trick very few people have been unable to pick up."

The writer is clearly a promising young fellow. It was no surprise that he went on to win his first electoral victory -- as a Tory -- in 1900. The book is a fascinating curiosity and all the more tantalizing be cause it gives no clue as to why the young Tory, a few years later, joined the 1907 Liberal revolution that helped transform Old England into a 20th century state.

LOOKING BACK by JOYCE MAYNARD 160 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

In the spring of 1972, Joyce Maynard, then 18 and a Yale freshman, sprang full-blown upon the pages of the New York Times Magazine with a treatise on growing "old" in the 1960s. Since then, she has become the enfant visible of the magazine world, writing features about everything from proms to prodigies and becoming a gossip-column celebrity in her own right by tying up with the hero of another generation, J.D. Salinger (TIME, Jan. 15).

Her first book suffers inevitably from a sense of dej`a lu. It not only draws heavily on those earlier articles, it trades on childhood experiences shared to some extent by every reader. Even the author's self pity seems a bit wilted. On the very first page, she complains of a childhood "when being young meant finishing your milk and missing Twilight Zone."

Maynard's generation was David Riesman's Lonely Crowd come to life. No longer fine-tuned so much to parents or even to peers, her contemporaries were instead formed by a host of advertising slogans, magazine spreads and television screenplays. Maynard confesses that at 13 she was virtually enslaved by the fashion pages of Seventeen (she still has every copy since 1965), nearly traumatized by LIFE'S cover photograph of an unborn baby ("that eerie fetus") and mesmerized by the very worst of TV ("five thousand hours of my life into this box").

Not all cliches need apply, however. She claims that her generation's sexual promiscuity, when it existed at all, resulted as much from the expectations of the adult world as it did from liberated libidos. Still a self-conscious virgin when she first arrived at Yale, she asked herself, "How has it happened, what have we come to, that the scarlet letter these days isn't Abut V?"

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