Books: Silly Milly in Slavonia

THE VISITORS (576 pp.)—Mary McM/'n-nies—Harcourt, Brace ($4.95).

It may or may not be true that foreigners are funny, that men are silly and that dictatorships are absurd. At any rate, British Novelist Mary McMinnies makes it seem that way. With breathless garrulity she has spun out a story about a raft of people afloat on an ocean of misery in a modern people's republic. (The country is called Slavonia, and it resembles Poland, where she once lived with a British diplomat husband.) The "visitors" of the title —Americans and Britons engaged in the black art of propaganda—never had it so good. Larry...