Notable

THE AMBIDEXTROUS UNIVERSE

by Martin Gardner

Scribners; 293 pages; $9.95

Mathematics can be a delight in the right hands. Or in the left ones. In this newly revised classic, Science Writer and Mathemagician Martin Gardner shows how and why. The Ambidextrous Universe begins by looking at mirrors and discussing the strange world that can be entered, in the manner of Alice, merely by looking in. That world is reflected in unsuspected places: snail shells can go either way; planets move against the clock or with it; even crystals and molecules can be sinister or dexterous.

No matter how large the world or how small, Gardner makes it his home. Whether he discusses the "colors" and "flavors" of subatomic particles called quarks or explains the idea of entropy (the tendency for order to degenerate into disorder) or questions whether time can flow backward like a river, Gardner manages to enlighten his audience without overwhelming it. Few people take more pleasure in explanation than Gardner, who moves through his book like a boy in an overstocked warehouse of undiscovered toys and games. The Ambidextrous Universe allows readers to share his pleasure and to learn as they move down the aisles.

CHAMBER MUSIC

by Doris Grumbach

Dutton; 213 pages; $8.95

Caroline Maclaren, age 90 and the widow of a famous American composer, resolves to put down the "extraordinary truths" of her marriage: she marries Robert at 17, and the couple move to Germany to live with his jealous mother. Shocks follow discoveries: after a few attempts, her marriage becomes sexless; Robert has a mysterious disease and later, she learns, a homosexual lover. Sores fester as Robert gives himself to neither his mother nor his wife.

Recognition cannot heal him: his disease is syphilis. While Caroline and Anna, his nurse, prepare him for death, friendship develops between the two women; after he dies, homosexual love takes hold, growing like the wisteria vine and flowers that Anna plants. The result is an odd, haunting composition. But the love that dare not speak its name eventually tends to drown out the delicate strains of Grumbach's musical prose.

CITY OF GOD

by Cecelia Holland

Knopf; 273 pages; $8.95

Renaissance Rome, the degenerate "City of God" ruled by the Borgias, is a favorite haunt of historical novelists. What distinguishes this imaginative tale by Cecelia Holland, author of ten successful historical adventures, is her highly original central character. Nicholas Dawson, secretary to the Florentine ambassador at the 15th century court of Pope Alexander VI, is an intellectually gifted, arrogant homosexual without a country or a creed. Hungry for ducats and power, he is willingly coerced by the notorious Cesare Borgia, the Pope's illegitimate son.

As a double agent, Nicholas plots two of Borgia's famous villainies: the murder of Cesare's captains and the capture of Urbino, a fortress city, by brazenly doublecrossing an ally. But loyalty in this arena is more dangerous than treason, and Nicholas' devotion to a former lover proves his undoing--and almost his death. As usual, Holland, who writes refreshingly taut prose, dispenses with the ponderous plots and pageantry of the genre: her people matter much more than their costumes. By substituting mental thrust and parry for the metal kind, she proves that there can be more to historical thrillers than swordplay and seduction.

DISTANT STATIONS

by Jonathan Schwartz

Doubleday; 358 pages; $10

A TV interviewer who has dropped out to do some soul searching in Southern California; a woman writer with the disconcerting habit of throwing her voice at crucial emotional moments; a dim-bulb movie star and her producer paramour, who keeps his wealth in a sock drawer and begins too many sentences with the phrase entre nous: these are the featured players in New York Disc Jockey Jonathan Schwartz's resonant first novel. At a glance, it may seem another tour of Joan Didion's empty existential horizons --damaged people failing to communicate in a dry land. But Schwartz's central character, Paul Kramer, renders his past imperfect with a poignancy that gives the novel a solid grounding. His Memorex ear for dialogue and his unblinking self-examination provide the basis for a muted, moral judgment on life as it was lived along the San Andreas Fault in the good old days of Watergate. If Paul's relationship with Emily, the ventriloquist lady, remains a trifle too enigmatic, that does not fatally flaw a novel of wit, sensibility, and a delicate honesty about the ways (notably sexual) in which distant stations send and receive signals across the modern wasteland.

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