The Quick and the Dead

by Thomas Wiseman. Viking, $6.95. The universally corrupting influence of Nazism is Mr. Wiseman’s basic theme, but unlike the majority of authors who tackle the subject, he has refrained from lamentation and belated questioning of fate and Freud. He has merely written, with style, dash, and irony, a novel about two young men in Vienna, one a half-Jew whose talent for hypnotism enables him to survive “the whores and the holocaust” and the other an ambitious officer with “the swagger and glittering air which have been Austria’s most conspicuous contribution to militancy.”