(4 of 5)
"Very interesting, to exaggerate wildly," as one of Newman's wisecracks goes. Worth a smile, at any rate, as Philpott-Grimes, the overeducated and under-muscled pugilist, puns his way to a title shot. It is unclear, and unimportant, whether Newman actually knows anything about boxing. He does know a lot about journalism, and some of his best gibes are about television and the press, including one notable satire of a team of excessively cheery newscasters. This is only to be expected from a veteran NBC correspondent who has spent a large part of his life on-camera, as one punchy character says about a TV anchorman, "standing in front of a government building and saying that only time would tell."
GIVING UP THE GUN: JAPAN'S REVERSION TO THE SWORD, 1543-1879 by Noel Perrin Godine; 122 pages; $8.95
This surprising moral treatise concerns a historical episode little known in the West in which the Japanese, having learned to make and use firearms, thereupon set those skills aside for 200 years. Portuguese sailors brought the first matchlocks to Japan in 1543, and within a few years the Japanese were using their own much improved models with bloody effectiveness. A nationwide revulsion then occurred, not because of the bloodiness, notes Perrin — Japan was one of the most bellicose countries on earth — but because guns gave common soldiers the means to kill noble samurai. By the time Commodore Perry forced the opening of Japan to the West in 1854, only scholars were familiar with the words that described guns.
The nation had been kept free of invasion for two centuries by the fierce reputation of the samurai swordsmen and by the power of artful invention: strips of canvas were displayed on the seacoast when ships passed near. On the strips were murals of forts, and on the battlements of the painted forts were painted cannons.
CLASS REUNION by Rona Jaffe Delacorte; 338 pages; $9.95
Remember The Group — Mary McCarthy's novel about eight college girls and how they grew? Change Vassar to Radcliffe, the '30s to the '50s, take away the wry tone, and you have Rona Jaffe's readable reworking, Class Reunion. The four women in her sorority are archetypes:
Annabel, the flirtatious blond, ends up as a buyer for Bloomingdale's; Daphne, the Golden Girl, hides her epilepsy from her friends, marries a Harvard jock and has a mongoloid daughter; Chris, the shy romantic, marries a homosexual; Emily, the rich Jewish girl, dreams of med school and settles down as a doctor's wife.
Although Jaffe remarks that there were "civil rights uprisings in the South" and that "the Watergate hearings went on and on," such external events have little effect on her women. When they gather for a 20th reunion in 1977, their preoccupations are unaltered: clothes and contraception, careers and families, the right cars and the right men. It is a formula that Jaffe has cannily employed in her earlier books, and a sequel may soon provide another: in the epilogue, Annabel's daughter Emma is looking forward to going to—where else?—Radcliffe.
WILD OATS by Jacob Epstein Little, Brown; 267 pages; $9.95