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STITCH by Richard Stern. 205 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.
Golk, a first novel, seemed to be a dark spoof on the TV industry but wasn't — Author Stern explained that it was really about "amateur human beings." Stitch seems to be about wasted human spirits, in this case a frustrated expatriate sculptor, a frustrated expatriate girl poet and a frustrated expatriate family man dithering around Venice together. But Stern says its theme is "that those who don't have a genuine love affair with what has counted have no genuine existence." It is his fourth novel, but he still seems to be just clearing his throat.
TONY'S ROOM by William Glenton. 183 pages. Bernard Geis & Pocket Books, Inc. 75¢.
So that Princess Margaret and her photographer husband, Lord Snowdon, will feel right at home during their forthcoming visit to the U.S., the publishers are rushing into print 1,250,000 copies of this cloying little tattletale. Guaranteed to contain juicy passages not published in England because of Palace censorship, it is absolutely the definitive work about the one-room London dockland hideaway that Tony enjoyed as a bachelor. Frequently, Tony brought Meg there during their courtship. They liked the place so much that they kept it for four years after their marriage. The book was written by their ex-landlord, who lived upstairs and sometimes emptied the ashtrays and rinsed out the glasses after they left. Tells all the facts: how the furniture was secondhand and the double divan was badly sprung, how Tony (before Meg came into his life) and his little Eurasian girl friend, Jackie Chan, sat for hours like a pair of goblin tailors, sewing together the room's straw carpeting. Little did Jackie know . . . There's even an account of the gay soiree when Noel Coward's Cointreau glass left a sticky ring on the piano.