Summer Reading

Shogun by James Clavell. 803 pages.

Atheneum. $12.50. It is 1600, and English Captain John Blackthorne washes up in Japan during a failed attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Blackthorne is no simple salt but a bona fide Saturday-afternoon-at-the-movies hero with a "brooding, explosive violence that always lurked below his quiet exterior." His strength is as the strength of ten, and his brain is not bad either; he speaks English, Spanish, Dutch and Latin fluently. Hardly has he learned to say Konnichiwa (Good day) before Blackthorne is up to his clavicle in inscrutable Eastern intrigues.

A power struggle is brewing between the Oriental warlords, and the question on everyone's lips is "Will the guileful Toranaga try to become Shogun [military dictator]?" Does sukiyaki need soy sauce? Of course Blackthorne signs on as Toranaga's henchman, while still more rivalries congeal the already thickening plot: Buddhists v. Christians, Spaniards v. Portuguese, Franciscans v. Jesuits, Protestants v. Catholics. Author Clavell is an encyclopedic chronicler of Oriental lore (his bestselling Tai-Pan was set in Hong Kong), and he lubricates his massive research with regular doses of bloodshed. Readers who can suppress the urge to commit hara-kiri somewhere along the first exposition-laden chapters will get fair value for their money. Shogun is, all by itself, a relatively cheap summer vacation.

Crime on Her Mind edited by Michele B. Slung. 380 pages. Pantheon. $10. To support her blind husband, the heroine throws propriety to the winds and enters a "profession which was not only a harassing and exhausting one for a woman, but by no means free from grave personal risks." Not to put too fine a point on it, she becomes a detective. As this surprising anthology of 15 mystery tales demonstrates, the lady was hardly alone. The sisterhood began digging up clues a quarter-century before Sherlock Holmes appeared on Baker Street. They have been at it ever since.

Editor Michele Slung offers a bright lineup of female sleuths dating from Victorian times to the 1940s. Aside from Mignon Eberhart and E. Phillips Oppenheim, the authors will be unfamiliar to all but cultists. Even the worst of them, though, retain a kind of campy charm. For if the paraphernalia of detection have not changed much over the past 100 years, the women clearly have. In The Stir Outside the Cafe Royal (1898), demure Miss Van Snoop captures a notorious murderer and then weeps for 30 minutes. Observes the author: "She had earned the luxury of hysterics." Not so Jerry Wheeler, an ex-stripper who, in Angel Face (1937), is all hobnails, barbed wire and mean mouth. About one criminal, she says in her characteristic tone: "[He] had a face like one of those cobblestones they dug up off Eighth Avenue when they removed the trolley tracks." You've come a long way, baby.

Pride of the Bimbos by John Sayles. 258 pages. Atlantic-Little Brown. $7.95. In this comic first novel, Author John Sayles does not just ask that disbelief be willingly suspended; he wants it lynched. He offers up a woebegone five-man softball team (the "world renowned Barooklyn Bimmmmmboos") scrounging around for the carnival trade in scraggly Southern hamlets. Not only do the Bimbos play their exhibitions in drag, but they boast one of the shortest shortstops in captivity: Midget "Pogo" Burns, a onetime private detective now running from the giant black pimp he once shot up in San Francisco.

It is before the meeting of this preposterous pair that Pride of the Bimbos excels. Sayles has a deadly accurate ear for Southern cracker dialect ("Chick at awl?" asks a South Carolina gas-station attendant); the jabbering at a sand-lot baseball game ("Chuckerinthereissgahcantit"); and the good-ole-boy humor ("if that woman fell down a well, you could pump ugly for a week"). Best of all, the gruff friendship between Burns and the young son of a teammate is successfully played for both laughs and pathos; as it does in all initiation tales, the moment comes when the boy must measure up--in this case fill the midget's shoes. When it is not taking outlandish swings at the fences, Pride of the Bimbos proves that it can bang out a succession of good clean singles.

The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer. 252 pages. Viking. $7.95. "Compassion's like masturbation. Doesn't do anybody else any harm and if it makes you feel any better ..." If Mehring were simply the small-Boer caricature suggested by such blather, The Conservationist would be a cheap shot indeed. Instead, South African Author Nadine Gordimer, 51, makes him a human and nuanced advocate of the very thing her ten previous books opposed: the white-supremacist policy of apartheid.

Mehring purchases his farm as a tax write-off, but it gradually grows on him --and on the reader. Soon the African earth and its plowman conspire to give the novel its center and its soul. The lyricism cannot last. Mehring cracks up principally because the author must punish the undertow of racism that tugs at all his small virtues. To bring about the denouement, Gordimer resorts to a trick best relegated to gothic potboilers: the corpse that will not stay put. The body of a black man, apparently murdered, appears on Mehring's land. He has it buried. A flood brings it up again. The constant resurrection shatters the farmer. As the book ends, Mehring comes to understand that he can never possess the property that the blacks truly own and he can only occupy.

If this resolution rings false, its tone is almost drowned out by the intricate music of Gordimer's prose. Neither separatists nor liberal South African whites are likely to thank her for The Conservationist and its wholly believable "hero." Yet the cursed enchanted land she describes will probably never receive attention more skilled or loving.

Borderland by Neil Claremon. 192 pages. Knopf. $6.95. This remarkable novelette refutes an ancient adage: blood can be coaxed from a stone. The stone is that adamantine sector between Mexico and the U.S. The blood is the fervent tale of an American scientist, J.P., and his Indian mistress, Tsari. J.P.'s gift is an ordinary one: he can only find water under dry land. Tsari has more profound talents: in trances she can heal wounds, commune with animals and see the human soul. It is a secret that she comes in time to share--with ambiguous and perhaps dire results.

J.P.'s adventure traverses a course charted by Don Juan and Carlos Castaneda; by now it should be no more challenging than a walk around the block. Instead, Poet Neil Claremon, in his first novel, manages to trap the solar energy of his landscape; the shadowy Indian existence is thrown against the brilliant screen of another reality that hovers, shimmers and then vanishes the way it came. Claremon is a bit of a necromancer himself, easily summoning up the spirits of B. Traven, Garcia Lorca and--unhappily --Ernest Hemingway. It is in echoing Papa's Spanish style that the novelist makes his largest error. For to use "for" on almost every page is to bring a monotony to a highly charged work. For an author does not render Mexican into English that way. An occasional omission or a "because" works wonders. Because unlike J.P., Claremon, 32, displays far too much talent to follow the ancient ways.

Fresh Meat/Warm Weather by Joyce Eliason. 145 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95. "How strange it is," the heroine of this fierce and finely tuned little novel is reminded, "that Mormons, like Jews, nurture that feeling of inferiority in themselves while still believing they are God's Chosen People." As the book progresses, that paradoxical condition becomes both a rankling irony and a saving strength.

The young woman who narrates Fresh Meat/ Warm Weather is eagerly honest about everything: her childhood in a family of Jack Mormons (those who do not keep "the Word of Wisdom"); an early marriage that produced two daughters and a desperate infidelity; flight from Salt Lake City to sinful Los Angeles; a second marriage to an aspiring musician who hurries back to the car after his wedding meal so he won't miss the Top 100 on the radio.

She tells us everything, indeed, but her name. Yet anonymity seems much less a trick than an act of painful discretion by Joyce Eliason. Her book, a first novel, is spare and direct, told in a series of quick sense impressions that spin out of each other like the grooves on a record. She seizes the phantom detail that makes a memory jump to life--the texture of a jacket fabric; a room in the Mormon temple; the last words, wrenching and absurd, spoken to her by her dying father: "I'm so hungry."

Two qualities conspire to make Fresh Meat/Warm Weather quietly unique among current women's fiction: its heroine's refusal to bow before the litany of contemporary women's frustrations, and her discovery of the strength that derived from the Mormon heritage that once bound and choked her.

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