Notable

SOMEONE ELSE'S MONEY

by Michael M. Thomas

Simon & Schuster; 511 pages; $14.95

The worlds of art and high finance have sometimes seemed inseparable over the past two decades. If the dogged substitution of price for quality has defied good sense and good taste, fiction has been a major beneficiary. Yale-educated Michael Thomas, who at 46 has had successful careers in both milieus (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lehman Brothers), has distilled from the darker lunacies of these worlds a novel of crackling humor and mordant observation. Its bigger-than-Barron 's protagonist is Oilman Buford ("Bubber") Gudge IV, who has been content to nurse his multibillion-dollar fortune in the Texas Panhandle until lust and vengeance propel him forth like a plague of pissants.

Gudge has two serious problems: he is dying of cancer and he is totally at the mercy of his new wife Caryn, a dexterous Texas tart who has decided that she wants nothing less from Bubber than the most dazzling collection of Renaissance art left in private hands. Unfortunately, the pictures are not for sale. In addition, the dying man is hell-bent on getting even with a half-sister who once cheated him and a Senator who once humiliated him on TV. Gudge's revenge involves a vast investment swindle that will administer America (in the author's words) "a convulsive, purifying shock at the core of its folly," i.e., Wall Street.

This assault on the free enterprise system is devastatingly successful, and so, despite its complexities, is the author's handling of the caper. Its most memorable victim is Granada Masterman, Gudge's lumpy half-sister, who has built a door-to-door beauty-products business into an army of 14,000 Masterwomen that resembles more a religious cult than the Avon sorority. Granada aims to buy her way to social acceptance via the stock market and art patronage, and Thomas' depiction of the scramble of ars gratia ego is both deeply knowledgeable and unnerving.

If the novel has a hero, it is Nicholas Reverey, an honorable, fortyish art dealer who has an eye as acute as the late David Carritt's. The love interest is provided by Jill Newman, who manages to churn out gossip for a rag called That Woman! as well as an authoritative column for a financial weekly. As in his first novel, Green Monday, Thomas has assembled a picaresque cast of cutthroats, poseurs, cultural pimps and likable rascals. But the author's true love is for art, the canvases, the places and the people, of which he writes at times with the clarity and luster of a Rubens ... or the school of.

BACK TO BASICS

by Burton Yale Pines

Morrow; 348 pages; $13.50

The election of Ronald Reagan, argues Burton Pines, was the political culmination of a rising tide of popular disenchantment with the dogmas of postwar American liberalism. In a comprehensive and sympathetic survey of the social and economic issues that have galvanized conservatives, neoconservatives, evangelicals, Moral Majority members and the New Right, Pines finds the source of this counterrevolution in the backyards of millions of resentful Americans. "Resurgent traditionalism," he writes, "is most dynamic at the grass roots, in life's very private, yet most critical sectors. There, legions of Americans are going back to basics in education, back to Scripture and spirituality in religion, back to trusting the free enterprise system, back to appreciating the nuclear family."

Pines, a former associate editor of TIME and current vice president of the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., presents an academic analysis of these loosely connected movements, an anecdotal account of their struggles and a manifesto for furthering their goals. His "journey through traditionalist America" covers the social and family issues of those who oppose the ERA and busing, the economic worries of those who are fighting for supply-side tax cuts and deregulation of industry, and the foreign policy concerns of those who favor a tougher stand against Soviet adventurism. "Many of the sinews binding the movement's parts are basic conservative tenets, such as affirming authority, discipline, a moral order with a hierarchy of values," he writes. Whether these are signs that the U.S. has "begun a new era," as he claims, is debatable. But the underlying forces that Pines weaves together in his book have indeed proved powerful in the political arena.

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