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DRIVE, HE SAID by Jeremy Lamer. 190 pages. De/acorfe. $3.95.

In winning the $10,000 Delta Prize, this short but flatulent novel was the unanimous choice of three eminent judges-Critic Leslie Fiedler, and Novelists Mary McCarthy and Walter van Tilburg Clark, who is quoted as having found it "gigantically laughable." Well, maybe. But unlike Candy, the bestselling pornographic novel that passes itself off as a satire on pornography, Drive, He Said is serious as all get out. Most of its fun is unintentional. Thus, in one chapter, Basketball Player Hector Bloom and his chick Olive spend a busy evening nuzzling each other outside a diner, are chased over hill and dale by a Cadillac jammed with knife-wielding apists (strangely, they seem to be baddies), make passionate love to celebrate their escape. Then Hector, "in his last thought before he curled into the grip of deepest sleep, yearned for the clean true feel of a basketball." UNFINISHED FUNERAL by Nicco Tucci. 192 pages. Simon & Schuster. $3.95.

The reign in Spain, postulates the author, is "the cult of virility," and woman's fate is to be "enslaved and betrayed." On the reader's acceptance of this arch axiom teeters this over-suave tale. Its stagy business, and that of the Duchess of Combon de Triton, is to make her "appallingly stupid" cluke the first faithful husband in Spanish history. Her scheme is to win his compassion by feigning illness and his awe by submitting to surgical cures without anesthesia or a whimper. Some 30 agonizing operations later, the duke commits suicide. Now the widow, whose "only joy is to make others stay out of their own lives," can begin to "enjoy" her two children. "You may do what you want, but not before my death, which is quite near, I feel." At the faintest threat of their self-realization, back to the operating table goes the duchess. Tucci's style and setting may be drawing-room comedy, but life, as he reports it, is theater of the absurd.

NIGGER by Dick Gregory. 224 pages. Duffon. $4.95.

In this rather premature autobiography, Comedian Dick Gregory aims to laugh the word nigger out of the English language. "Wherever you are," he writes in the dedication to his mother, "if you ever hear the word 'nigger' again, remember they are advertising my book." The trouble is that Gregory is always

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