THE RUSSIAN INTERPRETER by Michael Frayn. 222 pages. Viking. $4.50.
Moscow is an off-the-beaten-track locale for cold war suspense novels, possibly because few Western authors can fight through the Red tape to gather local color. Michael Frayn won entree by studying as an exchange student at Moscow University. As a result, his sprightly book shines with an eerily realistic glow.
The narrator, oddly enough, is a young Englishman named Manning who is working on his thesis at Moscow University. He is hired as an interpreter by a countryman, Gordon Proctor-Gould, who bears a striking resemblance to Greville Wynne, the British salesman who in fact ran secrets for Russian Spy Oleg Penkovsky before the Soviets nabbed them both in 1962. Proctor-Gould may or may not be in the intelligence game himself (he, of course, denies it), but Frayn, a satiric columnist for the London Observer, cannot resist giving him a bizarre cover job: he recruits everyday Russians for appearance on Western lecture circuits and TV. "The press and television in Britain and America," Proctor-Gould explains blandly, "are crying out for good human material."
Such nonsense is swept away when a seductive, blonde party intellectual shacks up with him and steals his books. Then she forces the two Englishmen to steal them back from a KGB agent's apartment, after which, naturally, P-G and Manning are kidnaped by the secret police and flung into jail. The book winds up with the two freed from prison and jetting home to London. The implication is that Proctor-Gould is now spying for the Russians. But is he really? Frayn doesn't say. The effect is illogical but somehow appropriate, as it is, perhaps, in real-life espionage.
PEDLOCK & SONS by Stephen Long-streef. 370 pages. Delacorte Press. $5.95.
When crusty, 80-year-old Judith Pedlock visited London, she wrote a postcard to her daughter Gertrude reporting that the weather was rainy, that the stiffness had left her right knee, and that she was bringing back to the U.S. a Mr. Jacob Ellenbogan, whom she intended to marry. The news infuriated the wealthy Pedlock family down to the third and fourth generations. Mama must be off her rocker! It was all rather nasty, unhealthy, and yet somehow not un-Jewish—not that any of them really gave much of a damn about being Jewish. Then anger turned to consternation when it developed that Mama was really planning the most Jewish act of her life: under the benign influence of Mr. Ellenbogan, Mama was going to endow an Israeli university with a great chunk of the family fortune.
All of this serves to give Stephen Longstreet the chance to let his near-assimilated Jewish-Americans ponder the quality of their Judaism and their allegiance to it. They also get drawn into a fierce proxy fight for Mama's bank account, and one of the characters even drifts behind the Iron Curtain for a little daring-do. Longstreet, who has written several screenplays and a hit musical (High Button Shoes) as well as eight other novels, is an old hand at story spinning. The pattern here is familiar, but it is a nice piece of goods all the same.