Mercurial God

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

THE DINOSAUR FUND by VARTANIG G. VARTAN 391 pages. McGraw-Hill. $7.95.

A football game reminds Mutual-Fund Manager Denver Milliken of the stock market: anyone who hopes to succeed must have a plan. The lines that stock prices trace on a chart suggest to Milliken the curves of a woman's body --and, the reader suspects, vice versa. For Milliken, a 29-year-old fictional prototype of the "gunslingers" who rode high on Wall Street in the late '60s, the market is everything: father, mother, wife and mistress; food, drink and recreation; be-all and end-all.

Which makes him a rather dull fellow to be the protagonist of a novel. Accordingly, the author, a veteran financial reporter who now writes the New York Times daily stock market reports, has also written into his story a kind of primer on mutual-fund management. Sample advice: "Buy the stocks of dominant companies in small but growing industries with a low profile." Vartan also offers a collection of anecdotes about bulls and bears of the past, which his characters recount with the fervor of Hot Stove League fanatics swapping memories about Willie Mays' catches or Curt Flood's legal problems. Vartan has also unwisely included some love affairs and a subplot about Milliken's revenge on the ex-basketball player who stole his first girl. Alas, it is all too obvious that to Milliken and colleagues, such matters are distractions; the excitement of sex can never equal the blood-pounding tension of making a killing on a big short sale.

But The Dinosaur Fund succeeds as well as anything in print at conveying the atmosphere of that strange world where life is infused into new fortunes with a few beats of the stock ticker. It is a man's world. It is a world of immense wealth, of private airplanes equipped with tiled showers and Roman baths in inner offices, all described with goggle-eyed wonder. The book's main plot is a conflict in investment strategy between Milliken, who thinks that prices can go only up, and his boss, Choate Cavendish, who lives for the day when such whippersnappers find out what happens in a crash. In the end, though, neither man is the protagonist. Vartan's real hero is the market itself --a kind of mercurial god that exalts its worshipers one moment, devours them the next, and demands single-minded devotion always. .George J. Church

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.