Bookends

TRANSACTIONS IN A FOREIGN

CURRENCY by Deborah Eisenberg

Knopf; 214 pages; $15.95

An eon from now, literary anthropologists will be able to reconstruct a state of mind, circa 1986, from the bones and shards in this distinctive collection. The stories are all in the first person, but each one presents a new character. An afflicted 15-year-old girl becomes involved with a 27-year-old man of ambiguous sexuality; an older woman, teetering on the edge of a breakdown, decides to jog instead of swim because "not only is running not cold, but I won't drown if I should stop suddenly"; another woman, traveling in Latin America, is dazzled by the profusion of rich colors but daydreams about the frail hands of her dying mother: "I traced with my finger the huge, adult bones, the fascinating veins that crossed it like mysterious rivers; I fitted my attention exactly to the ridgings of her knuckles, the wedding ring, her pale, flat nails." Not a false note sounds in these recordings of sorrow and sudden grace. Deborah Eisenberg's characters are a unique amalgam of the brave and antic; they regard difficulties seriously, but not themselves. In their perceptions and urban locutions, they might be the daughters of J.D. Salinger's women, the new Phoebes and Frannys, distressed, astonished and ultimately strengthened by the bewildering demands of contemporary life.

COME MORNING

by Joe Gores

Mysterious Press; 218 pages; $15.95

Joe Gores, a three-time winner of the Edgar award, is best known for his hard- boiled thrillers. His semibiographical novel Hammett became a film produced by Francis Coppola and helped shift his career toward scriptwriting, notably for such TV series as Kojak and Magnum, P.I. Gores' novel Come Morning, his first in eight years, displays a heightened visual awareness: it blends precise research into prison life, the gem market and rock climbing with outlandishly risky escapades, including a scene in which the hero circumvents a security system by mounting an elevator cable and skittering along a momentarily inactive high-tension wire. The basic elements are conventional: an ex-con who wants to go straight, a fallen woman redeemed by love, moral corruption that goes unnoticed by police, schemes and counterschemes for revenge, deluded invocations to chivalry and honor among thieves. The end game is enlivened by Freudian twists, but the greatest strengths are Gores' skillful crosscutting, swift pace and mastery of tone. Because his breakneck intensity never falters, the reader is unlikely to pause and notice the implausibilities of the plot.

DZERZHINSKY SQUARE

by James O. Jackson

St. Martin's Press; 245 pages; $15.95

Espionage is the nominal subject, but there are few spine-tingling pleasures in James O. Jackson's grimly fascinating novel Dzerzhinsky Square. His goal is to depict, in the ruined life of one man, the privation, squalor, illogic and naked fear of everyday existence for Soviet citizens. Jackson, TIME's Moscow bureau chief, hangs his narrative on the premise that Soviet soldiers who had fallen into Nazi hands thereby became "tainted" in the eyes of their government and, after the war, faced exile to Siberia or worse. He further suggests that U.S. authorities offered them new identities, enabling the soldiers to go home, but not resume their old lives, if they would spy for the West. The offers went to devoted family men who would not imperil their kin. This poignant tale of one such impersonation provides a ground-level view of four dark decades, from the Stalinist '30s to the imperceptibly detentist '70s.

A TOUGH ACT TO FOLLOW

by Max Wilk

Norton; 347 pages; $14.95

Longtime viewers fondly recall the programs of TV's alleged Golden Age, the '50s. A more realistic nostalgia has grown up around the era's scruffy, fevered atmosphere backstage. The film My Favorite Year offered peephole glimpses of those times; now Max Wilk, a noted historian of popular art, revisits the terrain in A Tough Act to Follow. His acerbic novel blends reverie with naked rage at conniving, screen-deep program executives who have displaced the medium's pioneers. Although some secondary characters and events are real, Wilk focuses on an imaginary comedian, Jody Cassel, natural star and born victim. At 21 she was a headliner; before her 30th birthday she had been forced into obscurity, leaving only the ghostly echo of her catchphrase laugh, "Wowoweeweewoh!" Her history is recalled through the reminiscences of onetime colleagues. Wilk is a cunning observer of show-business mores, and he knows as well as his heroine exactly how to time a laugh. There are plenty in this tart tale.