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THE PRIME OF Miss JEAN BRODIE, by Muriel Spark (187 pp.; Llppincott; $3.95). Knowledgeable readers of Muriel Spark's novels admire such crystalline structures of malice as Memento Mori and The Ballad oj Peckham Rye partly for the economy with which they are built. Avoiding bravura writing as she would a vulgar display of pound notes, this Scotswoman sits composedly among her characters, goading them by silence and an infrequent equivocal smile to disclose their sins. Rarely does the exposure require more than 200 pages, and at the end of a Muriel Spark novel, most readers find themselves wondering why other writers must babble on and on to twice that length.

Unhappily, in the present novel the author's spare style seems to be the product less of economy than of penury. The book consists of reminiscences by several former Edinburgh schoolgirls about an eccentric teacher who was the guru of their set. One of the girls betrayed the teacher, Miss Brodie, to a disapproving headmistress, and the story quietly explains the manner of the betrayal. The trouble with the novel is not that its subject is unpromising; Author Spark's fans are confident of her ability to discover astonishing falsities in unlikely places. The language stings as elegantly as ever, and when the author writes that gaunt Scottish schoolmistresses say good morning "with predestination in their smiles," nothing need be added to the description. The flaw is a thinness of texture; no single outline is untrue, but details are indefinite, as in a photographic positive taken too soon from the developer.

LOVE AND BE SILENT, by Curfis Harnock (246 pp.; Harcourt, Brace & World; $4.50). Strangers may think that Kaleburg, Iowa, is just a "Siberian collection of buildings," but to Farmer Robert Schneider it means pie and coffee at the Kaleburg Kafe, dances at the Cornflower Ballroom, high old times in Buzzy Burns's tavern, with its row of convenient cabins out back. His wife Donna is both high-spirited and indecisive, but he settles her down with a tumbling succession of babies. His spinster sister Alma proves more difficult. She falls in love with soft-spoken Roger Larkin, a feckless Southerner who holds the depressed view that the U.S. is a giant pool table and he its eight ball: the Great Pool Player Upstairs puts him now in the side pocket of Louisiana, now in the corner pocket of Texas. While he wanders, Alma sits patiently home, waiting.

This second novel of Author Curtis (The Work of an Ancient Hand) Harnack, 34, is ostensibly a study of the diverse marriages of Schneider and Alma, the sacred v. the profane. But what ultimately emerges is a tremulous song in praise of the Midwest, a region that has long needed a minnesinger. Harnack touches expertly on the deep small-town need to believe in such absurdities as 1) that little Joanie Henkman is the world's best cornet player, 2) that Ida Bean's goiter baffles the greatest brains in medicine, and 3) that if only Blacky Neuzig had been given his "big chance," he could have played major league ball. Iowa-born Author Harnack is married to Novelist Hortense Calisher and teaches English at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., a good thousand miles from the lowa he celebrates so well and warmly.

A CHURCHILL CANVAS, by John Spencer Churchill (308 pp.; Little, Brown; $5.75). Uncle could ape a gorilla as well as any man who ever lived. "Grr, grr," he would roar, and then crouch in the branches of an oak, "baring his teeth and pounding his chest with his fists." At the beach, Uncle was always the engineer who mobilized the children to build a fortress of sand against the rising tide: "More sand for the outer defenses! Stop the moat from flooding! Hurry!" Uncle also happened to be Winston Churchill, and upon this familial foundation John Spencer Churchill--a painter specializing in murals--has erected the scaffolding of his autobiography entitled A Churchill Canvas.

The Great Man, Nephew Churchill reports, cries in movies. He joins in the family tradition of greeting relatives by mewing like a cat or barking like a dog. Once during World War I, Nephew Churchill leaned out of an upstairs window and, drop by drop, poured the contents of a chamber pot down upon the heads of his uncle, then Minister of Munitions, and Prime Minister Lloyd George. But Churchill's accounts are more anecdote than insight: he never really tries to explain what makes the old man tick. And sooner or later, since he is writing an autobiography, Churchill is brought back to the problem of talking about himself. He has a lot to mention and not much to say. As an officer in a camouflage outfit, Churchill was on the beaches at Dunkirk--he later painted the scene--but his description is insipid. His family thought little of his love affairs --they called it "playing the ass in the bulrushes"--and he went on to have four wives. His family thought equally little of his desire to become a painter--they called it "playing the ass in the gutter" --and he went on to a career that has been something less than spectacular. Whether writing about his fun and games in the bulrushes or the gutter, Churchill never rises above the level of an amusingly gossipy chatterbox.

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