Beach Balls

ON INSTRUCTIONS OF MY GOVERNMENT by Pierre Salinger. 408 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

FAKING IT, or THE WRONG HUNGARIAN by Gerald Green. 411 pages. Trident. $7.95.

For summertime entertainment, the popular novel retains certain distinct advantages over even the most portable television set. The book is easy to operate and almost never needs repair. It functions at all altitudes and particularly well at sea level, where sand, salt air and suntan lotions have no adverse effects on its performance. These two suitable-for-summer novels are brisk, undemanding and unoffensive, except possibly to cautious Washington bureaucrats, Chinese Communists, members of the Italian-American Civil Rights League or Hungarians overly sensitive to the revolving-door joke (they go in behind you, but come out in front).

In On Instructions of My Government, Pierre Salinger, John Kennedy's press secretary, shows himself to be a pretty good Sunday novelist in handling predictable, Drury-style missile-crisis fiction. His troubled protagonist is Sam Hood, U.S. Ambassador to Santa Clara, an Andean republic lying in some spectral dimension between Peru and Bolivia (at the bottom of Lake Titicaca, perhaps). Hood is a seasoned though disillusioned diplomat from J.F.K.'s Alliance for Progress days who disagrees with his new President's policies but must obey orders. When Santa Claran rebels secure a mountaintop where their Chinese supporters intend to plant missiles aimed at the U.S., Hood is off on the last joust of his career.

Nuclear Egg Rolls. Yes, there is a showdown on the high seas when the U.S. Navy intercepts Chinese whaling ships in which the missiles have been concealed like nuclear egg rolls. Salinger throws in a Mafia scheme to turn Santa Clara into a tourist trap, complete with capos still in their Godfather costumes. There is an implausible love story and even a touch of self-caricature. At his worst, Salinger is merely perfunctory, as if laboring under the realization that his "topical" novel is already eight years behind before it starts. At best, he uses his own Washington experience with guarded competence.

The extremely competent Gerald Green is anything but cautious in Faking It, or The Wrong Hungarian, a romp paprikash that spoofs the big league literary life with endless verve and infectious silliness. Its hero-narrator, Ben Bloodworth, author of sentimental Jewish novels not unlike the high-grade schmalz Green himself rendered in The Last Angry Man, crashes an international literary conference in Paris. Bloodworth, of course, is snubbed by the heavyweights, who are presented by Green as obvious caricatures of real writers, most notably the Mailer-like wild man named Arno Flackman and a cloudy Sontag named Lila Metrick.

There is more glee than fury in the caricatures, and Green grinds his rubber axes in the midst of a Marx Brothers plot that parodies the standard spy novel. Unintentionally, Bloodworth gets mixed up with a pair of Hungarian scientists who perpetrate an elaborate mind-control hoax so that one of them can defect to join his old mistress. Bloodworth has a good time of it (readers will too), particularly during a brief moment of status when the literati look up to him as a CIA Scarlet Pimpernel.

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