Current & Various

BEWARE OF CAESAR by Vincent Sheean. 244 pages. Random House. $4.95.

The Roman philosopher Seneca came to a sad end. Spurred by patriotism, he came out of exile to tutor Emperor Claudius' unstable stepson Nero and was rewarded for his pains several years later when his onetime student ordered him to commit suicide. At least Nero recognized greatness; ordinary mortals died by torture when a shadow crossed the Emperor's demented brain. In this threadbare, novelistic pastiche, Vincent Sheean treats Seneca far worse. Though the historical Seneca was second only to Cicero as an exponent of Stoicism, Sheean's Seneca has only windy self-pity and a maundering facility with cosmic cliches ("In my opinion the wickedest and unworthiest of men are generally the most rewarded"). He shows little understanding of his venomous pupil, perhaps because Sheean's Nero is not a character at all but a dim amal gam of perfumes, painted lips and libido. In all, Sheean has taken one of history's wise men living in one of its most scandalous eras and produced a dry tract full of petty non sequiturs.

CATS DON'T CARE FOR MONEY by Christiane Rochefort. 183 pages. Doubleday. $3.95.

Christiane Rochefort's first novel, Warrior's Rest, won the Prix de la Nouvelle Vague in 1959. That book told, with almost clinical clarity, of the inexorable destruction of a young woman who surrenders herself to an insatiable, mad alcoholic. It is not likely that Rochefort's new novel will win any prizes. Celine is a casually wicked misfit who cannot abide middle-class posturings. So she marries Philippe, a stuffed middle-class shirt who is "obsessed with the Absolute the way some people are with golf." Middle-class sex with Philippe only accentuates Celine's boredom, and so she drifts into some high-class sex with her friend Julia, which seems to make life tolerable until Julia gets killed in an automobile accident. Well, that's the way the chassis crumples. Author Rochefort says that married life is hell for a woman who is married to a bore. No great shakes for the bore either.

THE LONG DAY WANES by Anthony Burgess. 512 pages. Norton. $6.95.

The illustrious line of British colonial fiction may have arrived at parade's end with this trilogy of short novels about the last days of British rule in Malaya; Britain has no place to send another Kipling, Maugham, Forster, Greene or Waugh. Author Burgess' witness to the waning of the imperial day is Victor Crabbe, a teacher in a multiracial prep school solemnly modeled by its British founders after Eton and Harrow (Burgess himself served for three years as an education officer in Malaya). Bemusedly, Crabbe sees that the system is crumbling, but the snobbery is not. Malays hate Indians, who hate Chinese. Every Asian hates the British, and secretly despises himself for not being British. Crabbe, who does not think himself superior to the Asians, is regarded as a madman. Who throws away superiority unless he is mad? The turnabout suggests what is wrong with the novel. Crabbe is truly without self-interest, almost without volition. It is very hard to write about such a hero.

MRS. 'ARRIS GOES TO PARLIAMENT by Paul Gallico. 152 pages. Doubleday. $2.95.

Aving already ad bestselling olidays in Paris and Manhattan, Mrs. 'Arris as ardly anyplace else to betake erself to but the Ouse of Commons. So that, in peccable cockney, and a scrutable plot, is where Paul Gallico's favorite charlady winds up. In the process she outsmarts Sir Wilmot, a political kingmaker who sponsors her political career only to divide the Labor vote. Thanks to Sir Wilmot's chauffeur, Mrs. 'Arris gets elected, only to decide that she prefers the backstairs to the back benches. Wherever Gallico takes her next, she will at least ride up in a Rolls.

AUGUST IS A WICKED MONTH by Edna O'Brien. 220 pages. Simon & Schuster. $3.95.

Edna O'Brien's fourth novel suggests that she knows more about growing up on an Irish farm (The Country Girls) and coming of age in an affair with an older man (The Lonely Girl, which became Girl with Green Eyes on film) than she does about sex vacations, Riviera style. After two years of separation from her husband, Ellen Sage "longed to be naked with all the men in the world making love to her, all at once." Instead, one by one, she gets a Viennese violinist who wants to learn dirty words in English, an aging American millionaire, and a muscular American movie star who leaves her with a venereal infection.

Eventually, Ellen totters back to an empty life in London and discovers, rather later than the reader, "a new sensation, indifference."

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