THE TREND Is UP (474 pp.)Anthony WestRandom House ($4.95).
Manhattan's literary sundowners, who read book reviews far more avidly than books, rate The New Yorker book critic Anthony West as a man with a high IQor Irritant Quotient. As critic. West insists on the old-fashioned but admirable principle that moral judgments can and should be made about books; as author, West moralizes, but in doing so, he ignores the first rule of Shavian dialectics: to edify, one must entertain.
In The Trend Is Up, West has written a modern immorality play about the allegorical...