Books: Homeward Bound

NIGHTWORK by IRWIN SHAW 344 pages. Delacorte. $8.95.

Douglas Grimes is the unlikely hero of Shaw’s high entertainment, Nightwork. A young pilot prematurely grounded by an eye ailment, Grimes answers the musical question: “What if $100,000 should fall into my lap?” That is almost literally what happens to him in the most improbable of settings — the St. Augustine Hotel (semibitter religious joke here), a Manhattan charnel house where Grimes works as night clerk.

Fleeing to Europe, Grimes meets a Faustian figure (but a Faust with charm) named Fabian, who knows every banker, concierge and con man from Rome to Gstaad. He teaches Grimes, the back slid Protestant moralist, how to increase and enjoy his money. But just as Graham Greene knew, Shaw is aware that the piper must always be paid, that his heroes must eventually return home to separate fates. Although they used to worship at entirely different literary shrines (Hemingway on the one hand, Evelyn Waugh on the other), Shaw and Greene are bonded in contemporary let ters by their ability to create a bestseller with moral resonance. “Given half the chance,” says this delightful romp, “every man becomes a hero.” Nightwork has no more serious point to make — except to remind the reader that he can gohome again. That, happily, is just what Irwin Shaw now intends to do, 24 years after he journeyed to Europe and decided to stay.

Mark Goodman