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A HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS, by V. S. Naipaul (53 I pp.; McGraw-Hill; $5.95). "I can't tell you how sad it make me to leave this house," the solicitor's clerk told Mr. Biswas. "Really for my mother sake, man. That is the onliest reason why I have to move. The old queen can't man age the steps." And so Mr. Biswas, ex-sign painter, ex-bus conductor, ex-journalist, achieved his heart's desire and moved into a dwelling of his very own. It looked "like a huge and squat sentry-box," he paid too much for it, the upper floor sagged, the windows would not shut, one door would not open, but it was a house.

Such is the simple plot of this new novel by V. S. Naipaul, 29, a Hindu who made a name for himself in his first novel, The Mystic Masseur, which recorded with sweet and sour irony the ways of the colony (291,000) of expatriate Indians who live in Trinidad. What counts is not the plot but the flavor of their slap-happy lingo and picaresque customs, and it all ought to be as much fun as a barrel of tonka beans in Tobago sauce. But Naipaul's House, though built of excellent exotic materials, sags badly; 'economy, style, and a less elastic blueprint would have done wonders.

TALES MY FATHER TAUGHT ME, by Sir Osbert Sitwell (207 pp.; Liftle, Brown; $4.75). As a family, the Sitwells--Sir Osbert, Dame Edith and just plain Sachev-erell--have got more literary linage out of self-exposure, on the basis of less actual literary accomplishment, than any artistic dynasty in history. Osbert. who earlier dealt exhaustively with all his relatives in his autobiography Left Hand, Right Hand!, has now found that its five stout volumes were not enough. Tales My Father Taught Me, the latest entry in this sibling revelry, is an afterpiece entirely devoted to his patrician papa.

Sir George Reresby Sitwell had no Napoleonic dreams; he was much too pleased with himself as he was. His passion was for messing about with the landscape of his native Derbyshire, creating grandiose gardens, installing great sheets of water, commanding elegant distant views. ".Such a mistake," he told Osbert, "to have friends: they waste one's time." Not wasting his own. Sir George did voluminous research on "The Correct Use of Seaweed as an Article of Diet," worked on a walking stick designed to squirt vitriol at mad dogs, planned an illustrated pamphlet entitled The Twenty-seven Postures of Sir George R. Sitwell. Projects like these ran in the family. A Sitwell kinsman went to the trouble of having his coat of arms carefully inscribed on his food.

BEBO'S GIRL, by Carlo Cassola (249 pp.; Pantheon; $4.50). This brief, bittersweet story of lovers separated by fate was first published in 1960, became the rage of Italy, and won the important Strega Prize (given the year before to Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard).

It must be explained as a success of sentiment, because there is not much to grip the imagination in the somewhat dimly drawn characters of Mara, a young village girl, and Bebo, a ig-year-old Communist and former resistance fighter. Bebo left the partisans with a big pistol in his pocket and a boy's pathetic notion that he could slay dragons with it. He swaggers about, beats up a Fascist priest, and finally shoots the young son of a militia sergeant. Bebo thinks himself a hero; he knows simply that his victim was a nonCommunist, therefore an enemy. Mara is indifferent; she does not really care much for Bebo or his problems. But when Bebo is sentenced to 14 years in jail, Mara decides to stick by him. At the book's end, with seven years to go, she is still sticking.

It is a little hard to see why everyone in the novel--and apparently the author too --considers Bebo a fine young man who is down on his luck rather than a nasty young fanatic who has blown the skull off a completely innocent boy.

THE LAST PORTAGE, by Walfer O'Meara (289 pp.; Houghfon Mifflin; $5). In 1789 a ten-year-old boy named John Tanner was stolen from a frontier farm in Kentucky by a band of Ojibway Indians. Tanner was raised by the tribe; he wore a breechcloth, carried a tomahawk, and married an Indian woman. But he never really felt at ease among the Indians, and.

as a mature man, he found the same sense of alienation when he tried to return to the whites. In 1830 a U.S. Army doctor at Sault Ste. Marie recorded Tanner's narrative. To flesh out the account, Author O'Meara, a former advertising copywriter turned historical novelist, falls back on his formidable store of frontier lore and suggests that the American Indian was something less than nature's nobleman, e.g., some tribes had a habit of roasting captured children alive. But O'Meara cannot get away from the fact that he just does not know enough about John Tanner, who is made to sound more savant than savage. Other private journals kept at Sault Ste. Marie indicate that the bedeviled Tanner eventually developed into a demented old man who finally disappeared while under suspicion of murder. Loyally, O'Meara does not think he did it.

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