Also Current

LET IN THE SUN by Woody Klein. 297 pages. Macmillan. $5.95.

The house at 311 East 100th Street in Harlem enjoys a reputation for being the grubbiest slum building on the grubbiest slum street in the U.S. It has been the scene of countless fires, fights, arrests, knifings, suicides, and a few deaths that defy all explanation. Woody Klein, reporter for the New York World-Telegram and Sun, relates the depressing history of this house, all the more depressing because politicians, social workers, and no end of other do-gooders have been promising to clean it up for decades, and yet nothing has actually been done. The fault, Reporter Klein finds, lies largely with the laxity of the city government and the profits to be had from slums. Avaricious landlords make a killing by collecting rents without making any repairs, then sell out quickly. Because they do not consider that owning a slum building is much of a crime, local judges hand down notoriously light sentences on those rare occasions when slumlords are haled into court. But as the great housing reformer, Jacob Riis, once put it, "Murder is murder, whether it is done with an axe or with a house."

SHORT FRIDAY AND OTHER STORIES by Isaac Bashevis Singer. 243 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95.

In every man there is a bit of dybbuk that will not be exorcised. This is the informing spirit of the world of Isaac Singer, who was born in Poland 60 years ago and still writes in Yiddish, though he has lived in the U.S. since 1935. In one characteristic fable, a deserted wife is consoled by an affair with a prankster posing as a demon; in another, a husband's daydream of adultery turns into nightmare when his genie procures for him a repugnant witch. Only once, in Singer's The Last Demon, does an imp face unemployment, and it is then merely technological. Seeking one final success, the imp tries to lure a villager into an affair with an official's wife. Grumbles the frustrated imp: "I had my handkerchief ready if he should spit on me. So what does the man do? 'Why waste your breath?' he calls out angrily. Tm willing. Start working on her.' " Who needs demons when man himself is a demon?

ARGEN THE GULL by Franklin Russell. 238 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

Author Russell has zeroed in on one particular Larus argentatus, or herring gull, and produced an odd, passionate saga of its free life and very hard times. Russell scrutinizes "Argen's" bird life from egg to watery grave 20 years later, an exceptionally long life span as calamity-prone gulls go. He shows Argen in the flock and drifting solo, molting and mating, gorging and regurgitating, rising and falling in the pecking order. Without ever bringing man into his pages, Russell draws an oblique comparison between the life of gull and man both caught in the grip of habit and driven by the search for home. So long as his big metaphor remains unstated and merely implicit, Author Russell flies straight and sure, occasionally soaring in his prose with the seeming effortlessness of his subject. But when he succumbs to the temptation to personify, he is in trouble. In fact, he succumbs to gullibility.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.