Books: Crazy Mythed-Up People

THE SECOND STONE (303 pp.)—Leslie A. Fiedler—Stein & Day ($5.95).

"Into the occasional squares, the tumescent alleys discharged themselves . . ." It is spring in Rome. Clem Stone, 34, is starving, having run through his G.I. checks and the patience of his wife abandoned back in the U.S. He has hocked his typewriter, and in any case has given up even the pretense of writing his novel, which was about the U.S. landing at Salerno. Another first novelist is at it again, the reader might well think, huffing and puffing and looking for...