Notable

ATLANTIC HIGH by William F. Buckley Jr.; Doubleday; 262 pages; illustrated; $22.50

Author-Editor-Raconteur-Gadfly William F. Buckley Jr. has already delighted friends and charmed critics with his account of a joyous transatlantic sail in Airborne (1976). So why, five years later, is Buckley charting the same course? Because, as he explains, "the wedding night is never enough." Or, to put it less metaphorically, the first trip and book were so successful that Buckley could not resist the temptation to set sail all over again.

And a good thing too. Atlantic High will not displace Two Years Before the Mast or Moby Dick from even the most loyal conservative's bookshelf; Buckley's voyage is a piece of cake compared with those undertaken by Richard Henry Dana Jr. or Herman Melville. The storms encountered by the chartered 71-ft. ketch Sealestial are really industrial-strength squalls; the calms are overcome by the expedient of switching on the engine. It is Buckley's crew--as fine a collection of overachievers as ever spliced the main brace--who make the trip a sentimental journey. On the way, the author analyzes celestial navigation: "The mortal enemy ... is the plain, dumb, silly mistake"; and discusses subjects as disparate as American literature, fatherhood and literary correspondence: "Everybody who has dominion over any kind of press space spends considerable time answering letters from convicted felons." On all of them he is diverting and refreshingly free of bias and political cant. The sea seems to affect him as it does the crew: disagreements on board--political, navigational and aesthetic--dissolve in a common affection for sailing.

Skilled, or able to make up in enthusiasm what they lack in seamanship, Buckley and his band have such a good time that they are "melancholy to make their final landfall and see their voyage end." Readers can only share that sentiment as they approach the last page.

DEADEYE DICK by Kurt Vonnegut Delacorte; 240 pages; $14.95

America's most easily understood novelist is back. And forth. In his new book, Kurt Vonnegut once again traverses time and space, filling the pages. With short sentences. And placebo profundities: "To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life." And bromides: "the witching hour," "laughingstock," "dumb luck," "social leper."

These terms are from the account of Rudy Waltz, pharmacist, playwright and nonstop bore. Rudy was twelve when he fired a Springfield rifle out of a window. And killed a pregnant woman eight blocks away. On Mother's Day. Hence the sobriquet Deadeye Dick. Talk about irony.

Now, at the age of 50, Rudy, still a virgin, looks back over the wreckage of his life. He recalls the husband of his victim warning: "We cannot get rid of mankind's fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true. I give you a holy word: DISARM."

But no one listens. Catastrophes proliferate. His father, who befriended Hitler during their student days in Vienna, expires in a blizzard, muttering "Mama." And Mama dies from tumors engendered by a radioactive mantelpiece. In his home town, a neutron bomb is accidentally exploded. The townsfolk die. The buildings remain.

In case some benighted sophomore has trouble tracing the symbolism, Vonnegut supplies a textual analysis in his preface. In the book, he writes, there is an "unappreciated, empty arts center in the shape of a sphere. This is my head... The neutered pharmacist who tells the tale is my declining sexuality. The crime he committed in childhood is all the bad things I have done."

Throughout, the author includes some dozen detailed recipes for dishes as varied as Haitian banana soup, chitlins and Linzer torte. They, at least, have something to do with taste.

SECOND HEAVEN by Judith Guest Viking; 320 pages; $14.95

In her second work of fiction, Best-selling Author Judith Guest (Ordinary People) has rearranged the furniture, repapered the bathroom and polished the silver. Unfortunately, these are the only alterations she has made in prose style or personnel. Here, the ordinary attorney Michael Atwood (divorced) and the ordinary housewife Cat Holzman (divorced) team up in the ritzy suburbs of Detroit to save a teen-age runaway, Gale Murray (battered child). The adults have already triumphed over the agony of their respective separations. Gale, 16, appears on Cat's doorstep one night with a badly burned hand, a victim of his religious-fanatic father's terrible chastisements.

The members of the trio play discords and harmony based upon Guest's familiar melodies: "As for love . . . what did anyone ever really know about it? You did what you had to do." The effect is relieved only when the author writes about what is further from her own experience. Gale's sojourn in a county facility for problem children moves with a poignant freshness and a depth of emotion, proving that, in Guest's case, talent advances with the imagination. Away from the shaded streets of suburbia, her gift appears anything but ordinary. .

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.