Notable

STARTING OVER

by DAN WAKEFIELD

290 pages. Delacorte. $7.95.

Built-in obsolescence was one of the great ideas of the 1950s. For the sake of the G.N.P., it was better if appliances and autos did not last too long. Now, nostalgia notwithstanding, it appears that perhaps the youth of that period were not put together too well either. Phil Potter, 33, came of age in the 1950s, went into public relations and married a model. Five years later, he watches his marriage fall apart.

Like the nearly 2,000,000 Americans who get divorced each year, Potter then has to start over. He leaves Madison Avenue for a job teaching at a junior college in Boston. He also enters the desperate maze of the newly unmarried. There are those lonely meals off the refrigerator shelf and, in Potter's case, so much booze that it seems increasingly unlikely he will show up for the next chapter.

Of course, there are also the one-night stands, two-night stands, etc. One affair loses its bloom but turns into a spiky friendship that periodically takes the novel a little deeper into what it is like to search for dependable and comfortable companionship. The search F comes to its inevitable end with an old-is fashioned Southern girl who is, beneath | the honeyed exterior, as tough as pork a rind. Potter is last seen as a retread bridegroom.

Like so many journalists who have taken up popular-novel writing for a living, Wakefield seems content to stripmine emotions while being careful not to scratch motivations too deeply. Perhaps intentionally, he has planted in his novel its own most accurate assessment. A film-writer friend of Potter's shows him a script and Potter remarks: "It wasn't anything that would knock you out, and had its share of cliche ideas and situations, but it wasn't all bad, either."

OARS ACROSS THE PACIFIC

by JOHN FAIRFAX and SYLVIA COOK

255 pages. Norton. $6.95.

The lesson of this trip is that if God had really intended a young British adventurer and his nonswimming girl friend to row their way across the Pacific in a 42-ft. boat, he would have found a way to put oars on the human anatomy. For some reason, John Fairfax and Sylvia Cook failed to take that divine negative hint, and for nearly twelve months in 1970-71 they painfully bobbed and stroked from San Francisco to Hayman Island, just off Australia, a journey of 8,000 miles. This is a spare but colorful account of their voyage and the strange interlocked lives they shared aboard the cramped Britannia H (Fairfax crossed the Atlantic solo in No. 1). It is short on providing any serious rationale for the caper (from the inside of a small boat, after all, the Pacific is not merely there, it's sort of everywhere), probably because really there wasn't one.

Fairfax and Cook, who amicably announce at book's end that they plan to go separate ways in life, maintain that once afloat they were partners only in the seagoing sense. In truth, they seem far from natural thole mates, he a fearless blue-water Tarzan, she a slightly petrified British Jane. The result is lots of sitcom sparring (Fairfax: "Why don't you want to see a dead whale?"), which gets progressively less seaworthy after the tenth day out or so.

THE UNGODLY: A NOVEL OF THE DONNER PARTY

by RICHARD RHODES

370 pages. Charterhouse. $8.95.

Since childhood their preachers had warned them of fire and brimstone, but on the way to California in 1846, the pioneers known as the Donner Party found hell in the Sierra Nevada. Snowbound from November to April near Truckee Lake, 34 men, women and children of the group of 79 died of cold and hunger. Many of the 45 survivors kept from starving by eating their dead.

The story of the Donner Party has remained beyond the fringe of what has been called the antiWestern. There have been historical accounts of the tragedy and even a long narrative poem published in 1971. But neither history nor verse could quite convey the range of a tragedy whose elements are nearly classical in their simplicity. Instead of jealous gods, it was nature that stripped the last shreds of pride from the pioneers and made them pay for survival by violating the most ancient taboo.

The real job in telling such a story is to find a technique that will not interfere with the natural narrative. Richard Rhodes, a Kansas journalist-historian, has done this simply by casting a historical novel in the form of a diary. In lean, densely detailed prose, he records the progress of the wagon train across the Great Plains, the Salt Flats and the Continental Divide. Arguments, fights, sharp bargaining foreshadow the social breakdown to come.

Rhodes is unsparing in the grisly detail, though never ghoulish. But fictionalizing history can often result in some unbelievable lines. "I ate your boy," confesses one survivor who becomes the scapegoat of the tragedy. Yet even such a scapegoat cannot absorb all the shame, and Rhodes chills us with nature's own truth: the heart may have its reasons, but so does the stomach.

HAZARD

by GERALD A. BROWNE

319 pages. Arbor House. $7.95.

This tidy amateur-in-espionage thriller can be trusted. It follows the reliable conventions and arrives on schedule at a suitably preposterous conclusion. The hero, Hazard, is casually superhuman; a lazy professional gambler, he just happens to have total recall. His girl friend has a boy's name, Keven. In addition to being a model and a health-food nut, Keven is a whiz at ESP. Hazard's modest ambition is merely to kill four Arabs who murdered his brother, but of course he strides right into a balmy Arab plot to lay waste to Israel with nerve gas ("one minuscule drop anywhere on the skin caused death within 60 seconds"). During Hazard's long course from Manhattan to the Great Pyramid at Giza ("not as impressive as he had imagined"), the reader gets some London tips (try Dukes Hotel) and the standard undigested gobbets of research that pass for a change of pace in this kind of book (this time the subject is deep-sea salvage). There are also a couple of interludes involving telepathy, restrained enough to be convincing, and some pandering to Israel so aggressive it amounts to condescension. Nothing in this book is as good as the ton-of-diamonds gimmick in the author's bestselling 11 Harrowhouse. Hazard succeeds by taking no chances with the formula.

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