Far from the South Pacific

THE FIRES OF SPRING (495 pp.)--James A. Michener--Random House ($3.50).

For his first book, the fine, simple Tales of the South Pacific, James A. Michener won a Pulitzer Prize. For his second he is likely to get no prize at all, but he may get plenty of readers; The Fires of Spring is a racy pudding, steaming with overheated situations.

The novel tells in autobiographical style how a ragged orphan in a poorhouse grows up (or at least older) to be a ragged novelist in Greenwich Village, "the hidden valley between the breasts of Manhattan." The process involves long stretches in an amusement park, in college, on a Chautauqua tour, with sex adventures at all the milestones. These are anatomized in the lick-chop language of the love magazines ("the silver cascade of her body tumbled forth"), a style not necessarily The Fires of Spring's worst: once the hero actually "taste[s] the death that clings to the coattails of life."

Saddest of all, not a single character, not even the lustful urchin from the poorhouse, really comes to recognizable life. The Fires of Spring is fully as bad as Tales of the South Pacific was good.

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