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THE INNER ROOM by Vera Randal. 193 pages. Knopf $3.95.

A suspicion of too-easy success attaches itself to the madhouse novel as to the war novel; there is never any basic question of viewpoint. War is indisputably hell; so is madness. The problem remaining is merely the relatively simple one of eloquence. But this first novel has a force not completely due to its subject and a compassion wholly the author's own. It has drawbacks: the author, for one thing, has no ear for language. But her portraits of five women inmates of a mental institution touch deeper than the ear. Each of the women is observed at a different stage of madness. The first is seen in the few hours before her crackup, as she slips through her psychiatrist's fingers and breaks. The last prepares to face the world from which she retreated 13 months before. The episodes are separate novellas, and their separateness quietly states the isolation of insanity. In combination, they deepen and become a novel.

THE OFFENSIVE TRAVELLER by V. S. Pritchett. 240 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

"I represent that ancient enemy of all communities: the stranger. By 'being offensive' I mean that I travel, therefore I offend." says British Critic V. S. Pritchett in his introduction to this elegantly tailored travel piece. But his offensive eye is piercing. In Madrid, the light has "the radiance of enamel: in the hot months it is pure fire, refined to the incandescence of a furnace, and it is like the gleam of armour in the cold winter." He is fascinated by the Turks' capacity for almost trancelike relaxation. "No one," he says, "sits quite so relaxedlly, expertly, beatifically as a Turk; he sits with every inch of his body; his very face sits." In Iran, Pritchett isolates the country's cruelty in a single, compelling anecdote about his hosts: they drive along the beaches of the Caspian Sea shooting falcon, sea gulls and teal indiscriminately, then take the wounded birds home for their children to play with.

THE EDGE OF THE WOODS by Heather Ross Miller. " 188 pages. Afheneum. $3.50.

From the South in recent years has come a corolla of gifted young novelists. Latest to adorn this company is Heather Ross Miller, 25, from North Carolina's Uwharrie River Country, where her first novel is laid. Heroine Anna Marie is obsessed by the memory of "Paw-Paw," her grandfather, "a stingy old man with a soul of tempered steel." When she is scarcely ten years old, Anna Marie stumbles upon "dirty old Paw-Paw" making love to his second wife. Later she watches from a hiding place when the half-crazed old man murders his wife and Anna Marie's young brother, then hangs himself. The memory haunts the mature Anna Marie, threatening to destroy her marriage and her life. All this is told in heavily freighted symbolism, mostly in terms of geological features. And the question at the end is whether Anna Marie will ever reach the edge of the woods, or be lost forever in the forest of her fears.

ROME 12 NOON by Kenneth Macpherson. 319 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.95.

Need something for an elderly maiden aunt? Here is romantic pish-tush, complete with nobility, scurrility, offstage virility, plight, blight, violent demise and intentions tragically mistaken. The locale is Rome. The heroine is Adriana, an aristocratic Italian beauty. One day, she is struck down by that scourge of modern-day Italy, a Vespa. She is helped to her feet by an imposing policeman, Captain Falconieri, in whom any reasonably perceptive reader can discern the ingredients of a true lover: "Above all, in the powerful current of masculinity beamed towards her." The current, however, is short-circuited by calamities--knifings, renunciations, drownings and tears. Wiser and weepier at the novel's end, Adriana muses about how it all started with "those funny little wheels! How hard the things could biff!"

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