Current & Various

IN THE SPRING THE WAR ENDED by Steven Linakis. 380 pages. Putnam. $5.95.

The difference between this first novel and James Jones's From Here to Eternity, to which the publisher compares it, is that Jones had something to say, however gracelessly he said it. Author Linakis settles for Eternity's vacant form: a military milieu, dirty words, laconism parading as toughness, and the staccato sentences, intended as drumbeats, that only evoke memories of a first-grade reader. The scene is Belgium after the war. The action is provided by U.S. Army deserters and assorted, brutal military police.

MRS. STEVENS HEARS THE MERMAIDS SINGING by May Sarton. 220 pages. Norton. $4.50.

"Everyone is everyone," says F. Hilary Stevens, a lady poet just this side of 70. "Only you and I are more so." The beneficiary of this advice is Mar Hemmer, a moony young man who has just concluded an alliance with a sailor. The two have that in common: Hilary was once married to a man, but manifestly prefers her own gender. They both write poetry too. Between Mar's visits, Hilary sandwiches an interview with two reporters from a literary magazine. This gives Poet-Novelist Sarton, who is just the other side of 53, an excuse to review Hilary's life and attachments (Phillippa the governess, Nurse Gillespie, Willa MacPherson, Dorothea and Madeleine HiRose) and gush about lyrical art ("Intensity commands form"). Absolutely nothing else happens. The title page identifies this book as a novel, Miss Sarton's ninth.

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