Books: Waugh Is He

WHO ARE THE VIOLETS NOW? by Auberon Waugh. 252 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.95.

Auberon Waugh is the son of the late Evelyn Waugh and a facile satirist in his own right (The Foxglove Saga, Path of Dalliance). The hero of Violets is an epicene idealist who ghostwrites advice columns for a woman’s magazine and comforts his faltering ego in a spare-time campaign for world peace. He also campaigns to seduce the white mistress of a Negro extremist, but before he can succeed, he meanders his motorcycle euphorically, and fatally, into the path of a passing automobile. So much, says Author Auberon, for epicene idealists. He has obviously inherited his father’s acerb satiric wit, but having nothing new to say, does not know what to do with it.