Short Takes

Human Amusements
By Wayne Johnston
Anchor, 326 pp., paperback, $13.95

Henry Prendergast, boy hero of this soft-spoken satirical novel, has an unusual security blanket -- an old TV set with an upside-down picture tube, which fascinates and comforts him through the tribulations of his topsy-turvy childhood.

At the age of 6, Henry has become, willy-nilly, a television star, playing the dual role of Bee Good/Bee Bad on ''Rumpus Room," a sappy kiddie show conceived by his mother, Audrey, a woman as earnest and ambitious as Henry's father, an unpublished novelist, is ironic and disengaged. ''Rumpus Room" takes Toronto by storm and turns the Prendergasts into besieged local celebrities. When puberty threatens to end his career, Audrey dreams up a new show starring Henry as Philo Farnsworth, the teenage inventor of television itself. The show becomes a monster hit, the epicenter of a fervent international cult with Henry its reluctant deity.

The image of Henry's upside-down TV set resonates throughout this scathing caricature of a culture raised, if less literally than Henry, on television. Yet Wayne Johnston also deploys warmth and charm in depicting a boy's awkward progress toward maturity. While the world sees through a glass picture tube, darkly, Henry learns to fine-tune his understanding of himself and those he loves.

Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy
By Lewis H. Lapham
Penguin, 178 pp., $19.95

Lewis Lapham, who writes regularly in Harper's magazine about our freedom to speak and our obligation to think, has become so troubled by the deterioration of both capacities in this country that he has written his first book-length work in a decade to sound the alarm.

A passionate and sophisticated student of American liberty, Lapham reminds us that we have been through periods like this before, from the Alien and Sedition Acts to McCarthy's witch hunts and J. Edgar Hoover's wiretaps, when threats, real or imagined, to our national security are seized on by those in power as an excuse to shut down domestic dissent.

But never before, warns this eloquent jeremiad, has an administration applied this ploy with such blatant cynicism; and never before have Americans, from a complicit news media to an ill-informed and pusillanimous public, assented so eagerly to the daylight theft of their constitutional rights.

Distracted by entertainment, dulled by talk-show blowhards and the acid rain of campaign commercials, the body politic may already be too infantilized to rise to the call of well-argued reason. Lapham fears this may be so. The powers that be may be banking on it.

Natasha and Other Stories
By David Bezmozgis
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 160 pp., $18

Exile is a state of mind in these striking autobiographical short fictions by the Latvian migr David Bezmozgis. As their sharply observant narrator, Mark Berman, progresses from childhood to young manhood, they reveal in isolated incidents the larger story of a family that in coming to the West has left behind everything except its sense of Baltic melancholy.

For Mark's parents, Roman and Bella, deeply affected by the loss of status and security that emigration entails, life in the New World is a depressing struggle. Their predicament is ironically reflected in ''The Second Strongest Man" when the family gets a visit from a champion weightlifter, Roman's protg back in Riga, who is bewildered to find himself on the downhill side of his competitive career.

In the title story, Mark, now a rebellious and troubled teenager, has his first earth-shattering experience of love and betrayal when he falls for 14-year-old Natasha, a supremely jaded new arrival from post-Soviet Russia.

With intelligence and cool detachment, Bezmozgis adds his contribution to a long and rich North American literary tradition. It is too soon to invoke names like Malamud and Roth, but his is certainly a talent worth watching.

Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.