Notable

SOMEBODY'S DARLING

by Larry McMurtry

Simon & Schuster; 347 pages; $10

As if a first-person novel were not difficult enough, Larry McMurtry narrates his new Hollywood story in three first-person voices. In Book 1, Joe Percy, a sixtyish screenwriter and seducer of bored young Bel Air wives, speaks of his affection for Director Jill Peel. Book 2 collects the machismo sputterings of Producer Owen Oarson, who moves in as Jill's great physical love. Book 3 is written in Jill's voice--a cool meditation on her life, her men, and their inscrutable ways.

Like a Hollywood morning, Somebody 's Darling gets off to a slow start, but picks up velocity and life (and more than a few deaths) as it moves along. McMurtry tosses off a few good Sam Spade-ish one-liners (an aging producer toasting in the poolside sun is a "ninety-year-old french fry"), and a pair of good-ole-boy screenwriters from Texas provide boisterous comic relief. McMurtry, who knows the Hollywood milieu firsthand, reveals a nice sense of place and trade. The celluloid scene has been done before; what McMurtry gives it--as he gave that sour Texas town in his The Last Picture Show--is a sense that even the meanest lives deserve a measure of compassion.

PANAMA by Thomas McGuane Farrar, Straus & Giroux 175 pages; $7.95

Thomas McGuane's first three novels (The Sporting Club, The Bushwhacked Piano and Ninety-Two in the Shade) certified him as a young man on the way to becoming a Major American Writer, one of the four or five best of his generation (he is now 38). McGuane, ran the critics' early form, was Hemingway by way of the drug generation.

Perhaps celebrity is bad for the talent. In any case, Panama is fairly minor McGuane. In his tale, Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy is an overnight American superstar rapidly descending to the white-dwarf stage. His act, something along the lines of Alice Cooper's, only more so, included a routine in which he crawled out of an elephant's behind and dueled with a baseball pitching machine. Now, his brainpan made porous by drugs, Pomeroy has withdrawn to Key West, where he maniacally stalks his old love Catherine. A man with a lot less charm or interest than the author imagines, Pomeroy is given to such gestures as nailing his hand to Catherine's front door with a gun butt. He is also inclined to flights of lyrical bombast: "They were pines that dared to suggest that islands are misery where brave horsemen run off the earth and topple into the unknown."

Panama may be intended as a dithyramb of exhaustion--Pomeroy's and, grandiosely, the American culture's. But despair loses something when it is unearned and vaguely cute. The novel savors of cocaine, narcissism and a certain impenetrable smugness.

MIRANDA by Pamela Sanders Little, Brown 429 pages; $9.95

"I have been sexually slumming for years," confesses Miranda Pickerel.

"Having finally broken the bonds of propriety, I, like a proper Victorian gentleman, reserved my screwing for sluts and kept my true loves on a pedestal."

Odd that she should compare herself to a gentleman; Miranda is very much a lady, despite her frantic attempts to live like a stripped-down version of Fanny Hill. Still, there are reasons for her attitude: for 30 years Miranda has been in love with Daddy, and the Electra currents never let up.

Bobbing on a yacht near Honolulu, the journalist heroine and her father, a domineering Englishman, begin to reminisce. Memories flood back: the death of Miranda's stepmother, her first lover, her childhood in a Manila prison camp, her second lover, her experiences as a gossip columnist and war correspondent, her third, 16th and possible 490th lover--the reader is never sure.

The sex of this first novel is, in fact, its least attractive aspect. All picaresques from Moll Flanders to Fear of Flying tend to grow repetitious; there are few things to give the woman who has everyone. But when Pamela Sanders, a former war correspondent, describes the Southeast Asian landscape she shows an acute sense of place, and her parodies of journalists are unfailingly funny.

This combination of commercial sexploitation and Oriental tong-in-cheek satire derives from Erica Jong and Evelyn Waugh. A peculiar and not unappealing combination, but Sanders would do better to write, as she does on occasion, in her own clear and witty voice.

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