Collector's Items

GRAND RIGHT AND LEFT (217 pp.)--Louis Kronenberger--Viking ($3).

Gordon Gary, 48, had everything money could buy. And why not? He was the richest man in the world (worth $9 billion), and he had a passion for collecting.

He had begun, naturally, with Old Masters, but the supply was strictly limited. So he went ahead with Gutenberg Bibles, racehorses, Stradivariuses, snuffboxes, stained glass, milk glass, Waterford glass and Venetian glass. He owned four spas, half of Chicago, an inland sea and a buffer state. The trouble was that Gordon's collecting interests quickly flagged, and whenever they did, his personality turned sour. At such times, he would stay slugabed all day, spitefully jolting the market by dumping or buying, and making life difficult for his wife Isabel.

The psychiatrist was stumped, but Isabel made a suggestion. Perhaps Gordon would enjoy collecting--people? Gordon thought it a marvelous idea, and his agents throughout the world quickly set to work.

At this point in Grand Right and Left, complications start running wild. Gordon tried to collect Winston Churchill, but the old hero declined. ("Not," said Churchill, "for the present.") He did get three prime specimens: an English duke, a famous lady writer, and a flashy European diplomat. But all three had their flaws. The duke turned out to be a remarkably unducal fellow who had recently been working at a part-time job addressing envelopes. The lady writer proved to be an inconvenient wisecracker. And the diplomat brought his slinky, good-looking niece with him. Soon Gordon was neglecting his collection in favor of the diplomat's niece, while the other celebrities hung around uselessly, and Isabel frowned in wifely worry. But Isabel took the situation in hand, routed the slinky number, and persuaded the richest man in the world that what he really wanted was a cruise with his wife.

It is entirely possible that Louis Kronenberger, critic, literary historian and theater editor of TIME, has tucked an urbane moral or two into this story of compulsive acquisitiveness. But the moral never bulges the story out of shape. In an age of lugubrious fiction, Author Kronenberger has produced a deft and witty little novel in the best tradition of high farce.

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