Notable

FLOATER

by Calvin Trillin

Ticknor & 204 pages; $9.95

Those who work for newsmagazines sometimes wish that life were really as the novelists depict it--full of eccentrics who collect iguanas and medicine writers who come down with the exotic diseases they have just described.

Take Calvin Trillin. Please. At the very least, take his book, a thoroughly diverting novel that nips at the unexposed flanks of the newsmagazine process, particularly the so-called back of the book, where a new sect or fad is no news until the magazine's editors/correspondents discover it. There is, for example, the "dirty bushes" story involving a gardener who prunes shrubs into phallic and vaginal shapes. And the quixotic "two-thirds stocking" fad, where the only stumbling block for the writer is what two-thirds means --two-thirds of the way to the knee or just two-thirds of a stocking?

No matter. Trillin, a TIME writer in the early '60s, has his fun, and his fun is funny. If the book

does not draw blood, it is perhaps because Trillin, now a New Yorker staff writer, seems to be writing benevolently with his nose pressed against the office window, looking in. For good or ill, satire requires both savagery and familiarity. The amiable Trillin has been away too long to give the shiv a final twist.

THE VICEROY OF QUIDAH by Bruce Chatwin Summit; 155 pages; $11.95

Bruce Chatwin sidled into the limelight two years ago with In Patagonia, a stylish piece of travel writing. The Viceroy of Ouidah finds his jeweler's eye playing over 19th century West Africa. The book is a novelization of the life and death of a footloose Brazilian named Francisco Felix de Souza, who flourished as a slave trader under the protection of the King of Dahomey. Chatwin began his research nine years ago in Dahomey and returned in 1977 to find the country named the People's Republic of Benin. "The fetish priests of Ouidah," he notes, "had put pictures of Lenin amid the scarlet paraphernalia of the Thunder Pantheon."

Yet Chatwin is no V.S. Naipaul balefully chronicling the political travesties of the Third World. His book is both a luminous historical document and an exploitation of the surreal past. The author's talent for invoking history's black magic is evident in this description of the interior of a rotting Da Silva house: "Dom Francisco's wardrobe, held together by its paint surface alone, lasted until 1957, when it collapsed, revealing a wreckage of whalebone stays and shreds of black taffeta that fluttered upwards like flakes of carbonized paper Bruce Chatwin . . . the pictures were

peeling, and all Twelve Apostles eaten away to leprous stumps. Yet, from the head of Christ, like the periscopic eyes of certain fish, two blue glass beads stood out on stalks."

WAYWARD REPORTER: THE LIFE OF A.J. LIEBLING

by Raymond Sokolov

Harper & Row; 354 pages; $16.95

Like Dr. Johnson, Abbott Joseph Liebling was negligent in appearance and lean in his craft. His death in 1963 was hastened by a lifetime of overeating.

The author had a sentimental fascination for the raffish life of New York and Paris. His best-known character is Colonel John R. Stingo, a bombastic Tunes Square denizen. But Liebling is best remembered by other journalists for his enviable style. In 1972 More, The New York Journalism Review congratulated itself on its first birthday by holding the "A.J. Liebling Counter-Convention," a salute to the godfather of New Journalism.

The wry honor would have gratified and amused him. Judging from Raymond Sokolov's biography, Liebling did not think he was an innovator but a perpetuator of a writing tradition at least as old as Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. Liebling's prose remain s Raymond Sokolov convincing because it rarely asks the reader to believe more than the author saw, heard, smelled, touched and, of course, ate.

Sokolov is guided by this principle in describing Liebling's beginnings as the son of an affluent New York City furrier, a student in Paris during the '20s, newspaperman, war correspondent and three-time husband, lastly to the late short-story writer Jean Stafford. Wayward Reporter tells more about the writer's work than about his life. Yet Sokolov, a New York journalist and restaurant critic, conveys the essential craftsman and gourmand who sopped up the life around him with the same melancholy hunger he displayed at lunch.

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