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THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE, by Evan Hunter (309 pp.; Simon & Schusfer; $3.50). Everybody talks about juvenile delinquency, but Evan Hunter, who used to teach at a New York City vocational high school, has done something about it. He has written a nightmarish but authentic first novel about the problem that should scare the curls off mothers' heads and drive the most carpet-slippered father to vigilant attendance at the P.T.A. On his first day at North Manual Trades, earnest young English Instructor Richard Dadier stops a 17-year-old from raping a new instructor on the stairs. Within two weeks seven boys waylay Dadier in an alley and beat, kick and gouge him into insensibility. The horny-handed principal and the cynical older instructors are no help to Rick Dadier in his attempts to awaken his pupils' bored, backward minds. When one boy pulls a knife on him, Dadier fights furiously, gets his arm slashed —and the class suddenly sides with him. The knifer is pinned down by other boys, and Dadier senses that there is a law of sorts in the blackboard jungle after all. He is even allowed to march the culprit off to the principal's office (and reform school), having won the right in trial by combat.
REUNION, by Merle Miller (345 pp.; Viking; $3.95). Author Miller, whose second novel, That Winter, showed him as a man who could write without having observed, has produced his fourth novel and can now safely be placed with that group of contemporary novelists who might be called Circumstantialists. The Circumstantialist, like the pack rat, cannot bear to throw anything away. Meticulously, he collects and records every circumstance of his characters' lives. Turning over every last scrap of detail, he seems to hope desperately that somewhere he and the reader may catch some glimpse of a real life beneath the litter of facts. Reunion concerns the get-together, eight years after, of eight survivors of a battle-scarred company. In the cast: the rising young lawyer with a beautiful wife and a not-so-beautiful Greenwich Village mistress, the ex-sergeant who plays the horses and the fillies, the gentleman farmer whose wife is unfaithful (he encourages it), the smalltown publisher whose wife is also unfaithful (he would deplore it), and Homer Aswell, who believes he is dead. Miller relentlessly records everything-the brand of cigarettes they smoke, the way they like their Martinis, the jobs they had, the girls they missed, how their houses are furnished, how they take a bath. This may not really add up to a novel, but readers will have some fun "recognizing" themselves or their friends in some of the meticulous sketches.