Summer Reading

THAT NIGHT

by Alice McDermott

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

184 pages; $14.95

"Enough, too much, has already been said about boredom in the suburbs, especially in the early '60s." So speaks the woman who looks back on her years of growing up in a comfortable Long Island fringe of New York City. What she remembers is excitement, that night long ago during her early adolescence when Rick Slater and a gang of his teenage friends drove up to a house across the street and tried to free Rick's girlfriend Sheryl from presumed imprisonment by the men in the neighborhood, including the narrator's father. None of the combatants realized that they fought over deserted ground. Sheryl, discovering she was pregnant, had been whisked away: "For in these matters, it was well accepted at the time, the girl must disappear and the hoodlum boy never know." That Night, Author Alice McDermott's second novel, deftly balances the ravenous powers of young love against the shelters of community, security, the orderly progress of generations. In the aftermath of the episode that night, the parents in the neighborhood "had only begun to learn that while their love had been sufficient to form us, it would not necessarily keep us alive." Passions, in McDermott's striking prose, both murder and create.

CROOKED HEARTS

by Robert Boswell

Knopf; 340 pages; $17.95

Playwright August Strindberg defined the family as an institution where self- respect is smothered. A hundred years later Crooked Hearts provides abundant evidence for the prosecution. The Warrens are a Sunbelt household who make failure a way of life. The father, Edward, plummets from history teacher to instructor in driver's ed. When one of his sons drops out of college, that seems reason enough to get out the unseasonable Christmas lights and have a party. The other two boys soon grow uncomfortable in the competitive world, and a sister concludes that her parents and siblings are "like . . . a family of elves . . . If one leaves, none of the rest of us grow up." Wise child. The children's fatal interdependence provides the subject of this piercing first novel. Author Robert Boswell smoothly oscillates from third to first person, giving the principals a chance to confess and dream. The voices are wholly convincing, and Boswell's apercus provide psychological criticism, as when Edward unconsciously utters his own epitaph: "No one wants to hear about a good man being good. It's the failings people want to hear." Wise father.

WHO KILLED PALOMINO MOLERO?

by Mario Vargas Llosa

Translated by Alfred Mac Adam

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

151 pages; $14.95

When belles lettres authors go slumming on the detective shelf, the result often sounds like Pavarotti singing the St. James Infirmary blues: respectfully overpraised by critics but not quite right. The noted Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) manages to avoid any such excessive resonance in his upper range in this spare mystery. Near a Peruvian air force base during the 1950s, a young airman is beaten, mutilated and murdered. There seem to be no clues, and the local air force commandant shows no interest in pursuing matters. The commandant and his daughter's fiance are suspects; both despised the low-born victim, who had been the daughter's lover. The daughter implies that her father was murderously jealous, and the father counters that the daughter is crazy. The trouble is not that the book leaves these complicated channels of guilt untraced but that it skips to its conclusion too quickly. The story has too little weight of detail. Brilliance can be tolerated, but tradition says a police story must plod; that is what those big black shoes are for.

CONTINENT

by Jim Crace

Harper & Row; 138 pages; $14.95

Writers have invented villages, cities and even countries. But it seems overly ambitious to imagine an entire continent. Not for Jim Crace, who does so in seven arresting tales of tribalism in the 20th century that attracted raves when published in Britain last year. In deceptively plain prose, Crace concocts a skewed reality replete with fictitious flora, fauna and customs. Human nature remains unreconstructed. Chaotic police states, social scientists and Western industry impose their wills, with strange results. A lonely agent for a mining company goes mad and returns his mineral samples to their geological sources. A village is enthralled by electricity that turns destructive in the form of a runaway ceiling fan. In the best story an aging master calligrapher discovers that his shop signs have become the rage of the Western world. His former apprentice, says the artist, "is growing rich on the pickings from my wastebasket." A wise character in another story takes a broader view: "What is superstition but misdirected reverence? . . . Unearth what is overvalued, amass it, and sell it at inflated prices."

MAJOR ANDRE

by Anthony Bailey

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

200 pages; $15.95

The year is 1780. Sir Henry Clinton, commander of the British forces attempting to put down the rebellion in the 13 American colonies, has received a startling and welcome bit of news. General Benedict Arnold may be willing to betray the revolutionary cause and, in the bargain, to arrange for the surrender of his stronghold at West Point. Sir Henry needs a liaison between himself and Arnold to conduct negotiations both delicate and possibly dangerous; the task falls to Clinton's adjutant, Major John Andre. Arnold's treason is a familiar story, but British Journalist Anthony Bailey retells it from an intriguing angle. Here is the brave but unlucky major, captured, his mission exposed, awaiting his fate and talking to pass the time. He asks his American guards to consider the principles that governed his behavior: "It seems to me that it is a proper object in war, to take advantage of a rebel officer's desire to return to his proper allegiance, don't you think?" He hopes, but does not beg, that his life will be spared. His monologue ends abruptly, but not before conveying the memorable impression of a man who comes to peace with himself in a time of war.

PEARLS

by Celia Brayfield

Morrow; 592 pages; $18.95

That thriving thatched-cottage industry of Britain -- writing very, very long romance novels -- is carried on these days by a new generation of hard- fingered women with tea cozies, cats and killer word processors. Close in the wake of Sally Beauman's Destiny comes Celia Brayfield's first novel, Pearls. Brayfield's protagonists are the fabulous Bourton sisters: Catherine, the "Mona Lisa of Wall Street," and Monty, the international rock star, who wake up one morning to find priceless pink pearls under their pillows. What do the gifts mean? Can they have anything to do with the sisters' late father James Bourton, "the Suicide Peer," discovered at his desk with a "red mess where his head should have been"? Brayfield intercuts 40 years of well- researched background -- from the rubber plantations of World War II Malaya, where James went in as a boy and came out a man, to the Sassoon haircuts of 1965 London and the cocaine of today -- to solve the mysteries of James' sad end and the girls' birth. Sisterhood is powerful in this passionate page turner, whose primary lesson is an angry one: don't cast your pearls before men, the swine.

A RELUCTANT HERO

by Francoise Sagan

Translated by Christine Donougher

Dutton; 191 pages; $16.95

"It was strange, thought Alice, how little nationality or civil status mattered in a heatwave." Remarks like that, the hallmark of Francoise Sagan's simple, wayward charm, occur often enough to make this slight tale worth a couple of summer hours. Maybe it should be read at night, out of doors with a flashlight, because it is essentially hocus-pocus about oversexed Resistance workers in the early days of the German Occupation. Alice and Jerome, both bright, attractive and world weary, have a glum affair going. Seeking a hideout for their efforts to help Jews, they descend on his friend Charles, who lives in a quiet town. Of course Alice falls in love with Charles; he is, after all, a man-child of nature who walks like an Italian beachboy. In the end, all three are separated by war. The trouble is that none of these people are believable as disciplined members of the underground. They are sensitive, spoiled Sagan characters, better at being bored than risking their necks. Out of their milieu, they remain oddly indistinct: when Charles admires one of Alice's frocks, she says, "It is a Gres . . . or a Heim." A true Sagan heroine would damn well know her designer.

THE MAN WHO OWNED VERMONT

by Bret Lott; Viking; 231 pages; $16.95

The title of this first novel is a trifle misleading. Rick Wheeler, an RC Cola salesman in western Massachusetts, owns very little except a tense marriage with Paige, his wife of five years. In the past, after fights in their small apartment, Rick could escape by driving across the state line to Vermont, where Paige has never been, hence a place that he can claim as his alone. Now even that consolation seems pointless. Six months after her miscarriage, which has driven Rick into self-absorbed guilt and silence, Paige has moved out. The question of whether this marriage can or should be saved generates some suspense. More interesting, though, are the paces Author Bret Lott puts his hero through during the ordeal of wifelessness. Living without Paige and most of the furniture, which she took with her, Rick fills up his empty days by becoming a demon salesman. He is so good that he attracts the attention of his bosses. Yet he realizes that even with a promotion and a raise he will never be able to afford the life and the house that he and Paige have dreamed up to embody their future. Given every reason to surrender, he struggles on. The Man Who Owned Vermont is a vivid example of mind and spirit grappling with oppressive fates.

PALE KINGS AND PRINCES

by Robert B. Parker

Delacorte; 256 pages; $15.95

Like many a mystery writer, Robert B. Parker is a former college English teacher who yearns to be taken seriously for his literary credentials while still shadowboxing within the tough-guy genre. In his two most recent novels, A Catskill Eagle and Taming a Sea-Horse, Parker's private-eye hero Spenser embarked on studiedly medieval quests to rescue damsels in distress. Some fans admired the chivalric plots and illuminated prose; others, finding these adventures merely portentous, longed for a return to the snarly, wisecracking style of Parker's earlier books and the ABC-TV series spin-off, Spenser.

The dissenters' pleas are answered in Pale Kings and Princes, a wry and rowdy tale of a Massachusetts burg corrupted by drug money. The first-person narrative is a running comic diatribe against such targets as ignorant bartenders, hash-house cooking, thick-necked lawmen and macho, possessive Latin lovers. Most of the talk is badinage rather than wit, but it serves to deflate the pomp without completely devaluing the circumstance. Violence pervades the landscape, yet Parker always pauses to evoke compassion for the victims. And despite the ebullient entertainment, his purpose is as serious as ever: to remind readers that so-called victimless crimes generate huge amounts of cash, which can then be used to suborn -- and victimize -- the very political system that citizens rely on for protection. -

BREAD AND CIRCUS

by Morris Renek

Weidenfeld & Nicholson

323 pages; $18.95

He was so synonymous with political graft that today William Marcy Tweed is recalled mainly by the sobriquet Boss. But Novelist Morris Renek knows that the bulbous, corrupt Tammany Hall leader was not merely a caricaturist's dream. He was an authentic 19th century figure with plans and desires -- not all of them villainous. Bread and Circus imagines Tweed in his salad days, graduating from modest alderman to urban caliph. The campaigner swiftly learns to deny himself nothing, devouring vast meals, acquiring power at the expense of the citizenry, puffing like a beached whale as he sports in the percales with a period piece named Augusta Cordell, estrous wife of a society figure. Renek never whitewashes the Boss, but he adds another dimension to the celebrated Thomas Nast drawings of Tweed as a vulture, a bloated moneybag and Falstaff. En route the author vigorously and accurately portrays his real hero: the city, with its teeming and angry slums, frantic mix of ethnic groups, riots, underworld schemers and high-level scandals, demonstrating that in New York, the more things change, the more they are the shame.

TO THE SARGASSO SEA

by William McPherson

Simon & Schuster; 461 pages; $18.95

Sailors once dreaded the blue Sargasso Sea, believing its gulfweed could entangle them forever. The protagonist of William McPherson's novel fears entrapment in other currents. Andrew MacAllister, 40, an American playwright, is lured by the danger of adultery while in London to open one of his plays. He feels "controlled by urgent signals other than his own." Later, when he and his wife Ann, "the couple on the wedding cake," are on vacation in Bermuda, he has a homosexual encounter and is shocked to find that his body continually horrifies him. In McPherson's fine first novel Testing the Current, the young Andrew was an observer of adult mores; grown up, he is absorbed with words. They provide his life's structure but are "slippery little things . . . and costly too"; he seeks a wider world and a new language. Some fish in the Sargasso, not true swimmers, need its twisted mass for support; Andrew must trust that he is "lost in the weeds, but swimming." McPherson allows a few jarring coincidences to intrude, but his wise story of longing and limitations shows the disturbances that lie close beneath reflecting surfaces.

THE ELIZABETH STORIES

by Isabel Huggan

Viking; 184 pages; $15.95

Those villains that first-time fiction writers pounce on and punish so often, Mom and Dad, are on the loose again. In this case they are Mavis and Frank Kessler, who live, with their only child Elizabeth, in a provincial town in Canada during the sanctimonious depths of the '50s. Dad's crime starts with his genes, for his daughter cannot forgive the tall, stocky body she inherited from him, or the airs he gives himself as the town's bank manager. Mavis' timid evasions and lingering aura of glamour are deep wounds to Elizabeth, the perennial gawky, dreamy child who spends her time eavesdropping at the head of the stairs. These eight connected stories stake out familiar ground. But in writing about early adolescence, Huggan finds her own frank and vibrant voice. In Secrets, when Elizabeth discovers where her mother actually goes when pretending to visit a chiropractor, she possesses a real secret -- not a scandal but something she can never reveal. Huggan freshly analyzes the earthworks of youth and offers unobtrusive twinges of nostalgia: Elizabeth is a girl who can see her latest emotional bafflement as a Playhouse 90 drama.

STARING AT THE SUN

by Julian Barnes

Knopf; 197 pages; $15.95

To see oneself reflected in a work of fiction is an agreeable surprise. When the invention is as polished as Julian Barnes' Staring at the Sun, the encounter can be remarkable. Readers of Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot should be familiar with the experience ("Flaubert's Parrot, c'est moi," wrote one reviewer), though not all will be prepared to see themselves in a seemingly ordinary Englishwoman born in 1922 and apparently still alive when the novel ends in 2021. Jean Serjeant's 100 years of comparative solitude are filled with humdrum facts and unprecedented fantasies, not the least of which is that in the 21st century she flies into the sun. This adventure -- or dementia -- is prefigured in an arresting passage: flying at 18,000 ft., a World War II RAF pilot sees the sun rise. Dropping to 8,000 ft. and lowering his angle of vision, he sees the same daybreak twice. Barnes has the gift of making such events sound magical. Jean's unexceptional life -- marriage to a policeman, divorce, menial jobs -- also takes on a glow. Barnes artfully uses the commonplace to challenge the spiritual funk of the modern age. In unexpected ways he conveys that God, or something equally miraculous, is in the details.