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THE STERILE CUCKOO by John Nichols. 210 pages. McKay. $4.50.

His fraternity brothers taught unawakened Undergraduate Jerry Payne "how to tip 'em up more and blow lunch less." But it is Coed Pookie Adams who is the making of him and of the whole first novel of John Nichols (Hamilton College, '62). Pookie is part tomboy, part playgirl, a sort of Alice in Wonderland with carnal vocabulary--and knowledge. And even when she is using both, Pookie is whimsical about it. Her most whimsical proposition is that she and Jerry make out in the phone booth while calling her minister back home in Indiana for his opinion on premarital relations. Jerry is not ready for such advanced technique, and their puppy-love affair soon becomes more depressive than manic, finally and affectingly (like the novel) whimpers out.

ILYITCH SLEPT HERE by Henry Carlisle. 224 pages. Lippincott. $4.95.

The Ilyitch in this cold war burlesque was Vladimir Ilyitch Ulyanov, latterly known as Lenin, and where he slept (during the summer of 1916) was a palatial Swiss chalet outside Bern. Or at least that is the sales story of the villa's canny proprietress, who has long tried to sell it to the Soviet embassy. But the Kremlin professes disinterest--until suddenly the historic site is bought by one Parker Atherton III and his wife Bliss, "a severely elegant, strong-minded girl with auburn hair and a trust fund." Atherton is a vice consul at the U.S. embassy, and his purchase can only be an imperialist plot. The Russians, mostly as sobersided as Military Attache Vassily Popov, who keeps his watch on Moscow time, charge one another with high treason. The Americans, generally as collegiate as Atherton (his qualifications: Princeton courses in "Great Ideas of the West" and "Great Ideas of the East"), try to turn it into low comedy. To no noticeable avail. The humor, clearly intended to be revisionist Ninotchkci, is virtually pre-Czar.

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