By Henry Lure

Every critic has his own definition of his function and impact. Says Martha Duffy, of our Books section: "I don't think of myself as a custodian of people's opinions. I'm trying to tell people who are interested in books what's around and what I think of it. I have no illusions about changing people. The person to whom I address myself is anyone who wants to read."

This week the Duffy message goes out on two lines. Along with three novelists and a fellow critic, she is on the jury scheduled to announce the National Book Award for fiction. Three of her shorter than usual reviews--of Hugh Nissenson's In the Reign of Peace, Antonio Callado's Don Juan's Bar and The Midnight Raymond Chandler--appear in our current issue's "Spring Cleaning" feature. In recent weeks she has also reviewed The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V. Higgins, and All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers, by Larry McMurtry. For her work as a book-award juror, Duffy read nearly 50 novels during the past six months. For her job as a reviewer, she usually skims dozens of volumes each week before she, Editor Timothy Foote and Reviewer R.Z. Sheppard pick which books will be reviewed. Then comes the close, serious reading necessary for writing perceptive and usually amusing notices.

From time to time Duffy escapes from her book-strewn office to interview an author. She visited Vladimir Nabokov in Switzerland ("warm but very formal--we met at meals"); Saul Bellow in Chicago ("difficult, a very private man who doesn't like to talk about himself"); Mary McCarthy in Paris ("vibrant and intuitive, she doesn't come on as a bluestocking"). Duffy finds that "most serious writers are self-conscious and reticent. They aren't used to being interviewed, and they're wary." Authors of lesser stature are more talkative. Erich Segal (Love Story) met Duffy for lunch at a Manhattan restaurant and was "like a hot fan blowing in my face." She found Jacqueline Susann (Love Machine) to be "hardworking, rather aggressive and wanting to mother everyone in sight."

Married to a Manhattan lawyer, Critic Duffy is a cooking and opera buff who has been a bibliophile since her childhood in Cambridge, Mass. As a youngster she went through a period of fascination with all writings medieval and devoured battle accounts of World War II. After earning a degree in English at Radcliffe, she worked briefly for a publishing house that is now defunct, then joined TIME in 1960 as a Books researcher. Three years ago she became a full-time critic. "If my job ever became such that I couldn't read on my own, I would give it up," she says. "You read differently when you read to review, more slowly, and always with the idea of the review in your mind."

She enjoys a well-plotted mystery once in a while, but finds most bestsellers depressingly poor. She tends "to fix on one author and read everything he's done. Right now I'm on a real Proust kick. I read him in college very quickly, and I'm rereading him now. I'm starting the fifth volume and I never want it to end."

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