TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070290/0702470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 11.1 KB | 219 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 66

Summer Reading


How to beat the heat with spies, anchormen, police and a
revitalized Pope

By STEFAN KANFER


    "A land of ice and ice cream and baseball and beach picnics
and outdoor concerts, of freedom felt in the body itself." John
Updike's celebration of a summer holiday omits one delight:
reading John Updike. It can be experienced in the pages of
Summer (Addison-Wesley; 252 pages; $35), a collection of
seasonal bouquets by 37 writers including Mary Cantwell (To a
City Breeze), Laurie Colwin (How to Avoid Grilling), Wallace
Stevens (Sailing After Lunch) and Meg Wolitzer (The Summer
Reading List). Herewith another summer reading list to beguile
the hours spent in hammocks, grass and sand:

    No small subjects for Arthur Hailey. Others may write about
a double room or a 747; he takes on the entire Hotel and
Airport. In his tenth novel, Hailey, 70, offers every sound
bite of The Evening News (Doubleday; 564 pages; $21.95), plus
executive-suite skirmishes between an anchorman and a
correspondent, rivalries for beautiful and ambitious women, and
a global sweep, from Vietnam to Peru -- with requisite stops in
Washington, Los Angeles and New York. The characters are
familiar, and the insights strictly keyhole. But Rather, Brokaw
and Jennings could learn a lot about pace and timing from the
old pro.

    Kim Wozencraft is a former narcotics policewoman who got
hooked on drugs and became an armed robber. In this fictive
treatment, the protagonist is called Kristen Cates, but all
resemblances to the author are strictly intentional. The
upright Texas girl gets hooked in order to trap a dealer,
backslides into the nightmare underworld of pushers and
addicts, and finally surfaces in another kind of purgatory:
jail. Rush (Random House; 260 pages; $18.95), Wozencraft's tale
of temptation, fall and rehab, sometimes gropes for expression,
as if the recollections were too painful for words. In every
sense, this should make one hell of a film.

    Since the coming of glasnost, the international spy novel
is defunct. So goes the current wisdom, and it is as false as
the leads in Soviet Sources (Atlantic Monthly Press; 264 pages;
$19.95). Novelist Robert  Cullen, a former Moscow correspondent
for Newsweek, jolts the genre into new life with a plausible
plot and authentic detail. Stationed in the U.S.S.R.,
journalist Colin Burke discovers that the nation's leading
reformer has suffered a stroke. Hard-liners plan a takeover,
and part of the plan is framing the American on trumped-up
charges before he can spill his scoop. Meantime, a Soviet
actress is also trying to go West. Cullen's chilling portrait
of Soviet society in flux is an ideal antidote for 90 degrees
weather.

    Socially, John Sutter and Frank Bella rosa are poles apart.
One is a well-born, wealthy lawyer; the other is the head of
a New York crime family. But geographically the two men are
close neighbors in a posh section of Long Island, N.Y., called
The Gold Coast (Warner; 500 pages; $19.95). The fences come
down when Sutter defends Bellarosa in a murder trial -- and
when the don seduces Mrs. Sutter. Or is it the other way
around? As Sutter wrestles with his instincts and his ethics,
the notion of vendetta no longer seems the exclusive property
of the Mafia. Nelson DeMille's previous books Word of Honor and
The Charm School demonstrated an ability to sustain tension;
this one adds a smart social eye and an unfailing sense of
humor.

    Another gold coast lies 3,000 miles away, in Orange County,
Calif. Joseph Wambaugh makes it the backdrop for The Golden
Orange (Morrow; 317 pages; $19.95), his tale of high rollers
on the sunstruck expanses of Newport Beach. Former policeman
Winnie Farlowe pilots a ferry and works at his favorite hobby,
drinking. One day he slams his boat into a yacht. The accident
introduces him to a much divorced lady with money, looks and
a conniving mind. Before Winnie's head clears, he is being set
up for a scam that involves betrayal and homicide. In The Blue
Knight and The Choirboys, Wambaugh demonstrated a Panasonic ear
for cop patois. In his latest work, the tension sometimes sags,
but the dialogue lingers in the ear: "An unsolved murder is
like . . . an insult to me personally, not jist to the corpse."

    "Think of Clifton Webb at age 40," says Dominick Dunne,
speaking of a gentleman bitch in his latest roman a clef, An
Inconvenient Woman (Crown; 458 pages; $19.95). And why not?
Everyone else in the novel seems to have stepped directly from
a '40s feature: plutocrat Jules Mendelson; his socialite wife
Pauline; his long-suffering mistress Flo March; and a sexually
ambiguous friend, the late Hector Paradiso. Hector's violent
death was marked as suicide, but Mendelson knows who shot him
and why. The cover-up is reminiscent of an actual Los Angeles
scandal; the malicious dialogue and the insider's knowledge of
West Coast society are Dunne's alone. The mix is simultaneously
off-putting and wickedly informative. Think of Rex Reed at age
60.

    First came The Shoes of the Fisherman, then The Clowns of
God. Lazarus (St. Martin's Press; 293 pages; $19.95) completes
Morris West's papal trilogy. Few laymen have written so
knowledgeably about Vatican politics. West charts the course
of Leo XIV, a crusty soul who has alienated the liberals in his
flock. Now the Pontiff must undergo bypass surgery, and as if
that were not threat enough, Muslim terrorists are offering
$100,000 for his life. Pope Leo returns from the operation like
Lazarus from the dead. But he is a changed man, with plans to
alter his church for the better. It is then that the assassin
moves in for the kill. No one but West would dare to mix irony,
suspense and faith -- and get away with it.

    Like many immigrants, the short story was born in Europe and
flourishes across the Atlantic. Case in point: The Barnum
Museum (Poseidon; 237 pages; $18.95). Although Steven
Millhauser can tell a straightforward anecdote, his true
strength is magic realism. In one tale a boy steps behind a
movie screen to find rooms full of ectoplasmic actors coming to
life for an audience of one; in another, a certain Mr. Porter
runs into inclement weather and washes away like a watercolor
in a rainstorm. Brilliant parodies, pastiches and comments on
Alice in Wonderland, Sinbad and T.S. Eliot show how this gifted
craftsman can stretch the boundaries of the form.

    On the shore of Chesapeake Bay, watermen surreptitiously
plan to get rid of a corpse before anyone can discover it. But
a small boy has witnessed the killing, and he knows who pulled
the trigger: his father. On the Western plains, a frightened
woman leaves her husband and four young children. He tracks her
down, and she relents as "her body starts flowing toward the
baby." A man returns to the ranch where his mother has married
a drunken old farmhand and finds she has done the right thing.
In a Father's Place (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 214 pages;
$18.95) is filled with such surprises, along with a profound
sense of place, character and incident. Christopher Tilghman's
first book announces one of the year's most significant debuts.

    Alice Munro may be the one contemporary writer whose work
bears comparison with Chekhov's, and she knows it. In Friend
of My Youth (Knopf; 273 pages; $18.95), the Canadian author
tells a story of burial at sea. She titles it Goodness and
Mercy. Chekhov wrote on the same subject and called his tale
Gusev. Is Munro's work a challenge or an homage? No matter;
both stories are masterpieces of subtlety and cunning. Other
tales investigate the vagaries of love, married and adulterous,
and the mystery that separates the sexes. One woman's musings
encapsulate the story collection: "A knot in his mind you might
undo, a stillness in him you might jolt . . . Could it be said
to make you happy? Meanwhile, what makes a man happy? It must
be something quite different."

    Ruth Rendell has enough talent for two people, so she also
writes mysteries under the name of Barbara Vine. They usually
concern a crime committed long ago; this time, Gallowglass
(Harmony; 272 pages;  $19.95) shifts from past to present, from
first person to third, like sand in an hourglass. The kidnaping
of an heiress was foiled years ago; now the same man tries to
commit the same crime, this time with the aid of the naive
narrator. An attempt is made to bribe the woman's bodyguard;
when he refuses, the malefactors kidnap his young daughter with
catastrophic results. As a plotter, Vine could study Rendell;
as a student of psychology, she can give lessons to anyone.

    In a formal mystery, when club members sit down of an
evening, one of them will never rise again. The others will
stand accused in the death by poisoning. The difference in
Murder Times Two (Simon & Schuster; 284 pages; $17.95) is that
the protagonist, retired attorney Reuben Frost, is one of the
suspects. Together with his wife Cynthia and his friend
Detective Luis Bautista, Frost searches for the real culprit.
Their investigation leads to the boardrooms of his old firm,
power lunches at Manhattan's toniest club, and the swimming
pools of Rio. Haughton Murphy (the pseudonym of James Duffy,
a retired Manhattan lawyer) writes with inside information and
civilized wit. The fifth adventure of Mr. and Mrs. Frost makes
them the most enjoyable pair of married sleuths since Mr. and
Mrs. North.

    John Bartholomew Tucker wins the prize for the year's best
mystery title: He's Dead -- She's Dead: Details at Eleven (St.
Martin's Press; 312 pages; $17.95). The puzzler that follows
is just as piquant. Jim Sasser, onetime TV commentator and now
a writer of thrillers, stops by the network to see an old
Vietnam war buddy. He is not a happy camper. Cost cutting is
under way, firings are the order of the day, and a terrorist
is threatening to do some eliminating of his own. For a lark,
Sasser decides to probe, just the way his fictional heroes do.
Thereafter troubles and murders begin in earnest. Tucker
wanders a bit, tells some good jokes and provides a smashing and
surprising denouement, in a dirigible high over Giants Stadium
during a Monday-night football game.

    Susan Orleans is a free-lance journalist who works weekends,
as evidenced by her lively nonfiction, Saturday Night (Knopf;
258 pages; $19.95). Ranging around the U.S., she watches people
spend and squander their leisure hours. In Elkhart, Ind., folks
drive slowly up and down Main Street. In Los Angeles airheads
make the club scene. In Baltimore an octogenarian goes to her
weekly polka dance; she has not missed one in nearly 30 years.
A Manhattan socialite lends credence to the belief that the
wrong people have money: "I'm always out in the country riding
my horse and so forth on the weekends, and even if I weren't I
can't imagine who would be around to invite for a Saturday
party." Every now and then some adventurous soul might try the
greatest diversion of them all: reading, just for the pleasure
of it.