TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070191/0701470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 11.5 KB | 233 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 70

Summer Reading


A dozen books to beguile a long, leisurely season in the sun

By STEFAN KANFER


    Peter Benchley's 1974 best seller, Jaws, starred the
shark that ate Long Island, became a smashing film and inspired
a school of sequels. After some dry runs, the novelist has
taken the plunge again. Beast (Random House; 350 pages; $21)
features tentacles rather than mandibles. Otherwise it is the
familiar mixture: lethal creature, relentless pursuers and vast
quantities of saline solution. When waters off Bermuda become
the killing grounds of a giant squid, tourism collapses.
Whereupon an Ahabian fisherman, Whip Darling, clambers into a
submarine and leads the hunt. All the old ingredients are
present, from aqua horror ("the creature moved toward the
unnatural thing") to Moby Dick denouement (" `Here!' he shouted,
and he drove the saw deep into the yawning beak"). In between
are adrenal confrontations and detailed descriptions of marine
life and death -- everything, in fact, but background music and
special effects. Wait till next year.



    The insinuations of Kitty Kelley satisfied some readers
and repelled others. A third group could not get enough
backstairs gossip, and its members are the target audience for
A House of Secrets (Birch Lane; 237 pages; $18.95). The novel
has two things to recommend it: a plausible first-person tone
of wounded innocence, and an author named Patti Davis -- better
known as the daughter of Nancy D. Reagan. The narrator is one
Carla Lawton, who grows up in California with few friends and
one opponent: her mother. Rachel Lawton lies compulsively and
attempts to control every aspect of her child's life. She makes
toilet training a battleground, then becomes an increasingly
jealous and violent competitor as Carla matures sexually.
Democrats eager for political revelations will be disappointed.
Throughout the misadventures, Daddy, a bicoastal businessman,
is malleable and remote as he floats through years of Teflon
fatherhood.



    Elmore Leonard controls more assets than a Mafia don. He
possesses a gift for lowlife dialogue, a thorough knowledge of
underworld mores and a mastery of high-tension narrative. What
he does not have is a gift for whimsy, and that, alas, is the
chief ingredient of Maximum Bob (Delacorte; 295 pages; $20). The
title character is a sleazoid Florida judge who likes to hit on
lady cops and hand out heavy sentences. Someone tries to ice
Maximum Bob with a unique weapon: a hungry alligator. There is
a long enemies list, including Leanne, the judge's loony wife;
Dale Crowe, the latest victim of his warped justice; Dale's
murderous uncle Elvin; and Dr. Tommy Vasco, a former
dermatologist with a skinful of booze and drugs. Maximum Bob's
survival depends on Kathy Baker, an attractive young probation
officer. She and the rest of the cast provide a few entertaining
moments for diehard fans. All others should wait until Leonard
takes early retirement from the police farce.



    The President, the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, an Australian
doctor, an idealistic revolutionary, a dazzling lady leftist
whose eyes show "a vulnerability that she took such pains to
conceal . . ." Len Deighton is at it again, this time in the
treacherous jungles of South America. Throughout MAMista
(HarperCollins; 410 pages; $21.95), guerrillas attempt to seize
control of Spanish Guiana, currently under the thumb of
cryptofascist goons. The covert war is rife with betrayal, and
ultimately no one is pure in Deighton's 17th spy novel.
Intrigues misfire; disease kills more effectively than bullets;
and corruption becomes the order of the day. Even so, the
characters are shrewdly delineated, and the suspense continues
until the final paragraph. Moral ambiguity used to be called
Greeneland. Since Graham Greene's death, that territory is open
for conquest. At least a part of it ought to be renamed
Deightonsville.



    When the body of Carla Tate washes up a few miles south of
Santa Barbara, the flashbacks unreel in A Hollywood Life (Simon
& Schuster; 320 pages; $19.95). The movie star, nee Karen
Teitel, makes her screen debut in infancy, moves on to kiddie
westerns and eventually becomes a major cinema celebrity. En
route she passes through every Hollywood vicissitude and
fashion, from child abuse to blacklisting to Vietnam protests
to exercise tapes. She also manages to collect a series of
husbands and lovers, most notably movie executive Jack Markel,
who has all the Hollywood requisites: he is 30 years older,
married, with strong ties to the Mob. David Freeman's pop
tragedy contains snippets of biographical detail from the lives
of Elizabeth Taylor, Shirley Temple, Jane Fonda and Natalie
Wood. You've read the movies. Now see the book.



    Back east, show business is more perilous for producers
than for performers. Ben Riller is an impresario with a string
of hits behind him and catastrophe in sight: he wants to
produce a play in verse. (There actually was a rhyming comedy
on Broadway this season, La Bete, and it bombed.) Short on cash,
Ben borrows from Nick Manucci, a colorful old mafioso who wants
10% interest weekly, plus 50% of the show. As events hurtle
toward opening night, agitations grow and Ben becomes more and
more indecisive until, like Hamlet, he begins having
conversations with his late father. Fortunately, they are witty
exchanges by two convincing characters. Then again, in The Best
Revenge (Random House; 240 pages; $20) everyone is convincing.
Along with Tennessee Williams, novelist Sol Stein was a member
of the Playwrights Unit at the Actors Studio. His portrait of
backstage back stabbing is as uncomfortable as it is amusing,
but Stein obviously knows what he is writhing about.



    Playing the devil's advocate is Father Andrew M. Greeley's
favorite avocation. His novels continually irritate the church
he serves, by revealing Vatican politics and presenting flawed
priests. The narrator of An Occasion of Sin (Putnam; 352 pages;
$19.95) puts forth the most imperfect of them all. The
scurrilous, irritable Father Lar McAuliffe is assigned to test
the claims of sainthood for his late detested colleague, John
Cardinal McGlynn, martyred in Nicaragua. Father Lar rubs his
hands in anticipation -- he knows all about the Cardinal's
mistress, his alcoholism and his rumored misuse of church funds.
But as the priest pokes through the debris of a dead man's life,
he finds that His Eminence performed many hidden acts of bravery
and altruism. Is he worthy of canonization? Or does the past
throw too long a shadow? Can it be that Greeley is knowledgeable
and skilled enough to make the reader care? Saints preserve us.



    When his wealthy Italian mistress dies, the amoral
historian Max Mather inherits first choice from among her trove
of paintings. Rummaging around, he finds two panels of aged
wood. On them are portraits that have never been cataloged, both
by Raphael, and each is worth in excess of $50 million. The
Italian government may seize such rare items as national
treasures, so Max works a scheme to spirit them out of the
country. But this is only the beginning of Masterclass (St.
Martin's Press; 330 pages; $19.95). Author Morris West (The
Shoes of the Fisherman, The Clowns of God) fills his palette
with informed descriptions of the cutthroat gallery world and
furnishes his novel with subplots concerning financial
shenanigans in Zurich, the ski slopes of St.-Moritz and a murder
in Manhattan. West, a longtime connoisseur, knows about the art
of the deal and the dealing of the art.



    A novel that stops on page 36 for a brief treatise on tea
is obviously not in a hurry. Neither are the protagonists of
Bronze Mirror (Henry Holt; 337 pages; $19.95). The Yellow
Emperor, who "discovered the wheel and the compass and such,"
the Silkweb Empress, responsible for "the delicate art of
silkworm rearing," and their courtiers all flourish during the
Song dynasty, circa 1135. Another invention is announced: the
Emperor's minister has developed a set of symbols called
writing. Now every royal tale can be recorded. The aristocrats
begin a leisurely contest for the title of best storyteller, and
during the competition every conceivable subject arises, from
sexual conquest to miracles, from poetry to war. Jeanne Larsen,
who previously conjured up the floating vistas of medieval China
in Silk Road (1989), returns to her theme without repeating
herself; this is the summer's most audacious entertainment.



    Imperials are not the only ones to offer beguiling short
stories this season. The long-neglected art of yarn spinning is
robust again, in three fine collections. Joan Chase's Bonneville
Blue (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 226 pages; $16.95) contains 11
poignant tales. In one of the finest, Elderberries and Souls,
the adolescent narrator recalls a passionate crush on her
stepuncle: "I was smelling his cotton shirt, smoke and starch,
and his soul, as if that, too, were a thing to be smelled." But
a sudden glimpse of his unstable temper makes her realize how
inexperienced she is in the ways of the world and propels her
into the arms of a simpler, safer and younger admirer. The sense
of yearning fills and illuminates almost all the other stories,
of small-town Madame Bovaries with insensitive husbands, of
divorces who can be simultaneously tough-minded and bewildered:
"I left my husband. Nearly six months ago, but I still can't
believe it. I keep thinking I'll wake up."

    Roxana Robinson is a fly on the wall in the world of the
Wasp. The people in her stories are inheritors of urbanity and
indulgences. They belong to garden and bridge clubs; they have
exceptional houses, servants, luxuries -- and woes. A Glimpse
of Scarlet (HarperCollins; 200 pages; $18.95) watches a divorced
mother betrayed by her son's prep school roommate; a man's
failing eyesight turn into a "treason of the body"; wavering
between wife and mistress, a publishing executive experiences
moral vertigo in his ordered world; a wife holds her husband up
to public ridicule, only to have things turn around as soon as
they are alone in the bedroom. Once people like these were the
focus of Henry James and Edith Wharton; in recent years Louis
Auchincloss and John Cheever have been their chroniclers.
Robinson shows a similar mastery of subject and form, and she
belongs in that august company.

    "Your brain can get out of hand," says one character in
Typical (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 207 pages; $19). Another
figures that "character is nothing but warts." Judging from
these 23 fictions, both statements are correct. Padgett Powell's
two previous books, both novels (Edisto, A Woman Named Drown),
exhibited a unique gift for regional American comedy. This
sparkling collection reduces his scope without limiting his
style. Dr. Ordinary is anything but: "He found God with no
difficulty, but locating his belief another matter." Miss
Resignation "liked football and was absolutely certain that she
could have been an excellent off-tackle, slant-type runner . .
. 44 was her number. Forty-four was her bra size, too. This had
held her back in life, she felt." Occasionally the other
characters in these fragments become a little too wacko, as if
they were acting out for the onlookers. But Powell has a unique
and vigorous imagination, and his eccentricity, studied or
spontaneous, is to be treasured and closely watched.