Motor City

Steeped in famliar icons and referents of the 1950s, from Levittown to Chesterfield cigarettes, this ingenious, swift and diverting debut casts a sardonic shadow of commentary forward to the 1990s. The setting is Detroit, 1954, where General Motors' Buick design team vies directly with the Plymouth division. Ted Mackey, Buick's power-hungry general manager, enlists his adulterous lover, car designer Claire Hathaway, as an in-house spy while he obsesses over Marilyn Monroe, whom he hopes will star in Buick's ad campaign. Meanwhile, GM styling chief Harvey Pearl tracks down his old Japanese flame, a Hiroshima bombing survivor who undergoes plastic surgery. Plot tangents enable the author, a columnist for the Greensboro (N.C.) News and Record , to cleverly work in cameos of Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, Jack Kerouac, LBJ, Ray Kroc, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Oppenheimer, Miles Davis and many more. Although the '50s collage sometimes wears thin, Morris displays the zealous detachment of a sociologist as he exposes fissures in the decade's as is, should be '50s with possessive s, whiich would be awkward bland materialism, exploring issues from tokenism in corporate hiring to the CIA's dirty tricks in Central America. (June)