The Manhattan Gambit/'Ludes

...And that's where the 'Ludes (Quaa-ludes) come in...

...This summer alone, Doubleday has come out with his latest novel, The Manhattan Gambit, and Bantam has released a new paperback edition of his best-selling 'Ludes, a wrenching chronicle of drugs and self-delusion that George Will-a man seldom given to positive overstatement-has hailed as...

...Lenny and Linda Brown are based on real people Ben Stein knew and loved...

...I particularly enjoyed the first tryst of the Nazi Bonnie and Clyde, a neat balancing of the old Adam and Aryan sensibilities climaxing with "ten minutes later, Trattner's face was buried between Maxine Lewis' perfect breasts as she lay on his bunk staring at a portrait of Adolph Hitler...

...Then, as we know it will, financial ruin comes...

...A frequent contributor to these pages and-to put my cards on the table at the...

...In Ben Stein's L.A., "a constant swirl of the stupid stealing from the stupider," Lenny's destruction is assured, but only after a long, sordid, but occasionally poignant ritual of self-degradation...

...So much for poolside reading...

...Perhaps his happiest moment arrives when, before the bottom falls out of his real estate scam, he presents Linda with a new white Jaguar...

...besides a regular column in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, frequent pieces in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, and the occasional screen treatment, he is a seemingly endless fount of new fiction and nonfiction titles...

...His own work in L.A., as a consultant to a famous television producer who was developing a new, political-theme sitcom, was ridiculous enough to keep his head clear ("I was mostly asked questions such as whether it would be possible to smuggle a rhi-nocerous into the boardroom of the Federal Reserve Board . . .") and he had plenty of time on his hands to witness Lenny's first big sale in his new West Coast role as a pitchman for shaky tax shelters: [F]or that hour's work, Lenny made about four thousand dollars...

...Ben followed their story with a caring view but also with a healthy sense of skepticism about the setting...

...All in all The Manhattan Gambit is good, occasionally dirty fun with an underlying commitment to the forces of decency and an ironic last minute twist on history...

...The weapon may have been gin instead of pills or cocaine, but the target, the vulnerability, was the same-a spiritual hollowness that, in harder times, would have been filled by the physical struggle for survival, and, in a loftier time, by a sense of self-worth and fulfillment based on something more durable than even the best engineered new Jaguar...

...he might just as well have said a real life: The old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed-love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice...

...Even more to his credit is the fact that most of them fit exceedingly well...

...THE MANHATTAN GAMBIT Benjamin J. Stein / Doubleday / $15.95 'LUDES Benjamin J. Stein/ Bantam Books / $3.50 Aram Bakshian, Jr...

...It is a tribute to Ben Stein that, despite the obvious shallow materialism of his anti-hero and the pliant, flimsy character of Linda, he makes us feel for both of the,m-and wonder how many more of them are still out there sleepwalking toward doom to the tune of the book's subtitle, "A Ballad of the Drug and the Dream...

...In Lenny's world, love, self-esteem, and psychic survival can only come from or be expressed through more money, more tangible, outward symbols of having arrived...

...reporting raised to the level of literature...

...Lenny and Linda, who might, just might, have coped in the comparatively real world of Manhattan, fall apart-especially Lenny...

...The sad thing about Lenny and Linda Brown is that, while they feel a true and deep love for each other, a love far from ephemeral and actually quite poetic, and while they are capable of both pity and compassion within certain bounds, their stunted sense of life and self lacks enough internal pride or honor to lend their story an element of tragedy...

...Powerful stuff, this, for marginal cases who deserve warning off, for the friends of Lenny and Linda clones, and for those of us who find it difficult to understand the lure of lucre and 'ludes...

...Add to the equation a crazed Teutonic Bonnie and Clyde duo-an escaped German POW and a brainless Valley Girl throwback who won't eat meat but enjoys butchering people-and you have the makings of a tongue-in-cheek thriller that provides good poolside reading and could be turned into a fair adventure film...

...a drug that temporarily shorts out both warranted and unwarranted anxieties and quickly creates a physical dependence and diminished sense of reality...

...Anyone who has read Benjamin J. Stein's Dreemz, an inspired send-up of present-day Hollywood and Los Angeles that the New York Times called "a witty, scary book full of bizarre epiphanies," will know what I mean...

...Both help us to stay sane...

...Nowadays she would probably stare at a poster of Robert Redford, but one knows the feeling...

...J. Edgar Hoover (rendered with a heartfelt nastiness), Allen Dulles, Enrico Fermi, Harry Hopkins, Robert Trout, and Admiral Canaris all figure prominently in the ample supporting cast, but the bulk of the heroic action is carried out by a sturdy, world-weary Irish cop and a rather piquant Jewish lady lawyer, with a proper assist from Albert Einstein who, after much provocation, emits a primal scream and dispatches the Nazi villain with a concealed kitchen knife -truly a man for all seasons...

...It may occasionally lapse into the maudlin, but 'Ludes is a moral, not a sentimental, tale, told with compassion and occasional glints of irony...

...She reacts with the same kind of Pavlovian response one has come to expect of prize-winning game show contestants, shrieking, jumping up and down, and hugging her "host" husband while caressing the car's lush red-leather upholstery...

...Reader, shed a tear and thank the Lord for Ben Stein and occasional recessions...

...outset-an old and cherished friend of mine, he is a writer who wears many hats...

...When William Faulkner accepted the Nobel Prize in 1950, he spoke of the essentials that go into making a real story...

...to follow their step-by-step self-disintegration is to feel real pain, helpless pain...

...If psychiatrists could have seen how happy Lenny was after making that much money, a whole new branch of medicine about the relation of people to money would have started, dwarfing Kohutian analysis in its scope...

...But Ben Stein is more than the F. Scott Fitzgerald of Tinsel Town...

...Greed, fanaticism, vulgarity, and narcissism can be made interesting, even entertaining, but they leave an unpleasant aftertaste-one of the main problems with much of our contemporary fiction and social commentary...

...Both books are worth reading, but on the principle that light matter floats to the top, and since The Manhattan Gambit is more of an entertainment and less of a think piece, I will attend to it first...

...He also continues to amaze with his prolific output...

...Lenny looked as if he had been told that he would never again feel pain...

...Still, there are some writers with enough humor and insight to give us an enjoyable cartoon view of grotesque milieus, past and present...

...Indeed, if I had to make one criticism of The Manhattan Gambit, it would be that the book reads a little too much like the first draft of a screenplay, with its constant mention of period props, its meticulously drawn shootouts and car chases, and its zany love scenes...

...They are not full people...

...I believe it is a book that will last, and one that will tell future generations as much about today's expanded, rather shallow lower middle-class aspirants to glitter as Fitzgerald did about that smaller, more fashionable (but, when you think about it, equally shallow) circle of beautiful losers that burnt itself out in the twenties and thirties, without benefit of Quaaludes...

...Novelist, colum-nist economic analyst, scenarist, social commentator, and comic artist, Ben has entertained and occasionally edified a large public on subjects as diverse as gilt-edged securities and guilt-edged insecurities, Valley Girls and vivisectionists, Watergate and Weimaraners...

...Ben Stein's 'Ludes is considerably deeper and infinitely more depressing, the real-life story of two beautiful losers who are swallowed up by the intoxicating, self-indulgent life-style of modern, big-money Los Angeles...

...It conveys a moral truth about the terrible price paid by persons who use chemicals to treat the pain of spiritual emptiness...

...Imagine, if you will, a few weeks in 1943 during which Albert Einstein is putting the finishing theoretical touches on the Atom Bomb, Adolph Hitler is chewing the rug and pressuring Heinrich Himmler to come up with a counterpart, and FDR is cynically ignoring the slaughter taking place in Reich concentration camps...

...something is missing in their makeup, not so much because of deprivation (both would probably have coped well with a subsistence society in which daily survival required full effort and concentration), but because they are exposed to a luxurious range of real temptations and false hopes that their parents and grandparents never dreamt of-that and the drugging unreality of the Los Angeles fast track...