Current & Various

THOSE WHO LOVE by Irving Stone. 662 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

In this long, painstakingly researched biographical novel of John and Abigail Adams, Novelist Stone has had the good judgment to stick to the historical facts and the good grace to forsake, largely, the flamboyant style that marred his bestselling biographical novels about Van Gogh (Lust for Life) and Michelangelo (The Agony and the Ecstasy). He lapses occasionally by trying to make the plain but amusing Abigail into a pert glamour girl, but he manages to convey the softening influence she had on her crotchety and unbending husband, from the day he first came calling when she was 17 until the moment, 40 years later, when they departed the still unfinished White House. As fictional biographies go, this is a competent job. But both John and Abigail Adams had a compulsion to put words on paper and then saved every scrap. Discriminating readers will find that the numerous volumes of their letters and diaries give a far better picture of their times and their relationship.

THE MANDELBAUAA GATE by Muriel Spark. 369 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

Scottish Novelist Muriel Spark has never been particularly fond of any of her characters. At best, she regards them with amused detachment, and in such finely spun structures of malice as The Bachelors and The Girls of Slender Means, she meticulously exposed their peculiarities and quivering insecurities. Unhappily, in this, her eighth and longest novel, Novelist Spark finally pays dearly for her indifference. She is obviously much more interested in the sights and sounds on both sides of the Mandelbaum Gate, which separates Israel and Jordan, than she is in her characters, and soon the reader discovers that he is too. Worse still, in order to shift them around, Novelist Spark resorts to a series of involved intrigues and page after page of gentle nattering. For a writer whose prose is generally among the most direct and polished in the business, this must have been a chore. For the reader, it is deadly.

THEY BOTH WERE NAKED by Philip Wylie. 418 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

In a relentless stream of splenetic essays and novels, Philip Wylie has profitably lambasted Mom, Pop, the common man, the businessman, the scientific man, sexy advertising, and American apathy in the face of potential nuclear disaster. Now he reports his latest revelation. Incestuous feelings are natural and healthy, but the fear of incest is the root of all evil. He discovers very TIME, NOVEMBER 5, 1965 little that is not evil in this tour through the libidinal jungle, which he ponderously describes through the eyes of a hero named -- ahem -- Philip Wylie. Commissioned to write the biography of an aging financier-philanthropist, Hero Wylie discovers that the old tycoon is guilty of multifarious fornications, industrial sharp practices, attempted treason, and coveting his own son's young wife. The girl ha.s a father complex, and the old man has a Mom problem -- the results of incestuous love repressed in their childhood, naturally. Hero Wylie understands their problems, but when they start an affair, he burns his notes and walks out. The reader may have beaten him to the exit. Prophet Wylie's inexhaustible choler dismisses with equal contempt sexual inhibition, racism, beehive hairdos, Middle Western accents and piped music. Perhaps it is time that a kindly cop asked him, gently, to move along.

STITCH by Richard Stern. 205 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.

Golk, a first novel, seemed to be a dark spoof on the TV industry but wasn't -- Author Stern explained that it was really about "amateur human beings." Stitch seems to be about wasted human spirits, in this case a frustrated expatriate sculptor, a frustrated expatriate girl poet and a frustrated expatriate family man dithering around Venice together. But Stern says its theme is "that those who don't have a genuine love affair with what has counted have no genuine existence." It is his fourth novel, but he still seems to be just clearing his throat.

TONY'S ROOM by William Glenton. 183 pages. Bernard Geis & Pocket Books, Inc. 75-c-.

So that Princess Margaret and her photographer husband, Lord Snowdon, will feel right at home during their forthcoming visit to the U.S., the publishers are rushing into print 1,250,000 copies of this cloying little tattletale. Guaranteed to contain juicy passages not published in England because of Palace censorship, it is absolutely the definitive work about the one-room London dockland hideaway that Tony enjoyed as a bachelor. Frequently, Tony brought Meg there during their courtship. They liked the place so much that they kept it for four years after their marriage. The book was written by their ex-landlord, who lived upstairs and sometimes emptied the ashtrays and rinsed out the glasses after they left. Tells all the facts: how the furniture was secondhand and the double divan was badly sprung, how Tony (before Meg came into his life) and his little Eurasian girl friend, Jackie Chan, sat for hours like a pair of goblin tailors, sewing together the room's straw carpeting. Little did Jackie know . . . There's even an account of the gay soiree when Noel Coward's Cointreau glass left a sticky ring on the piano.

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