Summer Reading

Novels, stories and nonfiction to be taken to beaches, mountains and hammocks

CHESAPEAKE by James A. Michener

Random House; 865 pages; $12.95

Another blockbuster, from the maker of Hawaii, Centennial and Iberia.

Once again the reader receives good value, at roughly 1 1/2-c- per page, in a succession of tableaux, more or less vivants. Each represents a scene from the social history of Chesapeake Bay.

James Michener's virtue is a powerful sense of place and the ability to convey great sweeps of time. His weakness is an insistence on covering murals with so much background and foreground that he has learned only a few ways of doing faces. One expression represents nobility, and another fills in the crowd scenes. Pentaquod, the Susquehanna Indian whose migration to the Chesapeake Bay's eastern shore in 1583 begins the new novel, is later seen as Cudjo the rebellious slave. He reappears as George Washington, who visits the bay area after the Revolution, and then as Onkor, the wise and valiant old Canada goose. There is nothing wrong with bringing George Washington or a goose onstage, but the author should make the two distinguishable.

Still, if the little lives of individual people sputter too briefly for careful notice, clan characteristics do take on recognizable shape. There are the Steeds, wealthy Catholic landowners, tending to be intellectual; the Paxmores, steadfast Quaker shipbuilders: the Caters, solid, intelligent descendants of Cudjo: and the Turlocks, swamp trotters and poachers. Their interlocking fortunes and catastrophes never quite qualify for the terms "gripping" or "absorbing," but they are consistently diverting. Therein lies the author's secret: an attraction that lies not so much in the story as in a serene detachment from the story. The reader gets a four-century vacation on Olympus.

This god's-eye view tends to blur more than it clarifies. "English settlement ... came somewhat later than depicted," says an exasperating prefatory note to Chesapeake, which also mentions that Steed and Turlock are invented names, "but it did occur at a spot only 23 miles to the north." Fiction with heavy doses of reality and reportage is not precisely history; history in which the names and places are not quite right is not yet fiction. Falling between two schools, Chesapeake is less than some of its parts: an agreeable, disposable epic destined for the summer beach, the fall bestseller lists and the winter rummage sale.

RAJ: A SCRAPBOOK OF BRITISH INDIA, 1877-1947 by Charles Allen

St. Martin's Press; 142 pages; $12.95

The perfect airplane book should distract during long, tedious hours of bad food and crying babies without absorbing so completely that the reader forgets to pray for a smooth landing. If, in addition, it whets the appetite for faraway places, the summertime traveler has the perfect prelude to vacation reading.

Take Charles Allen's Raj. With scant but incisive text, Allen offers a glimpse into the lush, complex maze that formed the life of India's British colonizers. It was a special world, formed equally of privilege and paranoia, isolation and insolence, duty and death. There was wasteful "organized slaughter" of wild game, rituals that combined the best and worst of East and West, and a false sense that the Empire would outlast the Indian hunger for independence.

The tale is best told in the more than 200 illustrations culled from scrapbooks, catalogues and official papers. No words can evoke the power of empire as starkly as a photograph of hundreds of servants lined up on the lawn of Government House in Bombay, or the Viceroy and Vicereine enthroned on an elephant. It was such ostentation that moved the Prince of Wales, Edward VIII, to remark that he had never known what royalty meant until cosseted there on a state visit. Here, too, are soldiers carrying guns to church and bending down to show medals to a Kiplingesque child who would soon be shipped "home" for long, lonely years of proper English education. The claustrophobic social structure of the Raj, with its orders of precedence and calling cards, takes on new life when the reader sees the instructions to guests at a viceregal reception: "The wearing of gloves by ladies at Dinner Parties at Belvedere this year will be optional owing to gloves being difficult to obtain as a result of the war." A beautifully designed book, its pleasures are in the detail--engaging and haunting visions of a dreamlike time.

INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND OTHER STORIES by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Harper & Row; 183 pages; $8.95

The long title story in this collection is a brutal Cinderella tale with no fairy godmother. It is a narrative about decay, greed and delusions of grandeur. It is also about innocence in the sense that Garcia Marquez's fictional villains and victims are guileless in their evil.

The author's voice, finely tuned in English by Translator Gregory Rabassa, carries the now familiar and unmistakable intonations: "She picked up a feather fan and began to fan the implacable matron, who recited the list of nighttime orders to her as she sank into sleep.

" 'Iron all the clothes before you go to bed so you can sleep with a clear conscience.'

" 'Yes, Grandmother.' " 'Check the clothes closets carefully, because moths get hungrier on windy nights.'

" 'Yes, Grandmother.' " 'With the time you have left, take the flowers out into the courtyard so they can get a breath of air.' " 'Yes, Grandmother.' " 'And feed the ostrich.' " Poor Erendira, in household bondage to a monstrous crone tarted up, tattooed and lost in "the swamps of the past." The girl's life worsens after she accidentally burns the house down. The old lady hits the road with Erendira in tow as an itinerant prostitute.

There is a prince charming of sorts whose actions free the girl, but there is no conventional happy ending. Erendira and her supporting cast belong to the world of legend that Garcia Marquez Yoknapatawphaized out of the Colombian landscape in his lengthy masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970). But the short story is not a form that can adequately contain his distinctive magic which requires proliferations of exotic plots, flowering images and familia' tangles.

Nearly all of the remaining stories in the collection were written during the late '40s and early '50s, when the author, now 50, seems to have been under the influence of Joyce and Kafka. Exhaustion, apathy, despair and death are the principal themes. It would have been difficult to predict from these early efforts the Garcia Marquez who is one of Latin America's leading novelists.

HOW I GOT TO BE PERFECT

by Jean Kerr

Doubleday; 288 pages; $8.95

Author Jean Kerr emerged as a popular humorist in the late 1950s, when the U.S. was in thrall to togetherness, Doris Day's celluloid virginity and the beckoning greensward of suburbia. Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1957) and two later collections of essays treated these and other national preoccupations comically but gently. She did not topple idols but admired them from a safe distance. Her pose was that of the indefatigable but bumbling striver, chirping away about her supposed inability to stage a dinner party, cope with preternaturally wisecracking children or conform to the feminine image conveyed in glossy women's magazines. If any malice was in her, she kept it out of her prose.

Only six new essays are included in this collection of vintage Kerr, and they are very much of a mellow piece with her earlier work. A few things have changed. Her children have grown up, so she discusses the many ways in which they fail as visitors: "Your A-l house guest does not usually bring along his dirty laundry." She has more time on her hands, so she has been able to acquire and then kick an addiction to TV soap operas: "In my experience, the only thing you can quit cold turkey is cold turkey." She notes how hard it is for parents to write newsy letters to their mature offspring: "It's too bad that the kid isn't interested in your bronchitis or the fact that the Chevy broke down on the Triborough Bridge and had to be towed home. But he isn't."

The early ones serve as painless reminders of the way we were before women's lib, the sexual revolution, Viet Nam and Watergate. But Kerr's later work is disquieting because it goes on as if none of these things had happened. A little malice, at least, now seems to be the order of the day.

ACTS OF LOVE by Elia Kazan Knopf; 436-pages; $9.95

She turned in the seat, pulled up her baby-blue skirt and offered two perfect pink buns. In the dark, they glowed like night flowers." Such high school imagery, unavailable in bookstores everywhere since Elia Kazan's last work, The Understudy, is now on display in his latest novel, Acts of Love. The sex is by the numbers, the philosophy has not yet graduated to the sophomoric, the characters are displayed in all their two dimensions, and the narrative is in overdrive all the way.

The acts of love are performed by Ethel Laffey, a half-repressed voluptuary who spends a good deal of time in the percales, principally with Greeks, among them vulgarian Businessman Petros Kalkanis and Naval Officer Teddy Avaliotis, whom she marries. Among other Sunday adventures, she is assaulted by her husband's mad father Costa. Kazan, a director of note (A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata, America America) tends to write scenarios rather than novels. That might be acceptable except for the fact that his dramatis personae seem to be created for the viewer rather than the reader. Still, the novelist's ear for Greco-American intonations is uncanny, and his destructive bitch goddess is so lethal that her comeuppance deserves the kind of cheers villains received when they were foiled in the last acts of Victorian melodramas. Neither they nor Acts of Love should be mistaken for Greek tragedy.

MARA by Tova Reich

Farrar Straus & Giroux;

250 pages; $8.95

Mara, the rabbi's daughter, is an antic rebel. Bribed back to New York from Israel, where she distinguished herself by disco dancing and hobnobbing with the arty underground, she and her beloved Sudah, an Egyptian-Israeli artist cum hippie cum pacifist, spend days assembling highly unorthodox outfits for their Orthodox wedding. Mara's veil is an old tea-stained lace tablecloth that gets caught on her steel-rimmed glasses; Sudah is resplendent in a black velvet suit, cape and top hat. First Novelist Tova Reich's glancing Swiftian wit never flags. She introduces one Rabbi Leon Lieb, who owns a chain of nursing homes and uses cajolery, threats and his-and-her fox cloaks as he obsessively tries to transform his son-in-law into a proper husband. But the newlyweds insist on going their own comic way: secreting a poet's mad mother in one of the nursing homes, serving as interior decorators to a psychotherapist who conducts his sessions in coffins. When Sudah renounces art for yoga, embracing celibacy as well, Mara is demoted from wife to sister. Disgruntled, she continues to work on her magnum opus, a series of short stories on the theme: "How I Lost My Virginity"; they form a memorable stand-up comedy within Reich's acid comedy.

OPTIONS: A PERSONAL EXPEDITION THROUGH THE SEXUAL FRONTIER by Marcia Seligson Random House; 290 pages; $8.95

How can a troubled Easterner write about the wide-open sex scene of California? Entertainingly. Marcia Seligson knows the tribal beliefs: monogamy and jealousy are bad; self-enrichment, looking for space and living with the authentic flow of the moment are dynamite. She has also taken the trouble to learn psychobabble, the indigenous tongue. "Guts are good, heads are bad," she writes. "You may never start a sentence with 'I think' ... If you begin with 'I feel' you can get away with atrocities." Group-sex enthusiasts seem to spend so much time and energy in pouty encounters that Seligson comes to feel like an anthropologist listening to aborigines debate the possible function of an eggbeater. Still, she may have tarried too long among the Californicators. At one point she wonders: "How do I even know if I'm having a successful sex life?" Though most of the book depicts surfer-stewardess relationships among muddled narcissists, Seligson concludes that the "valiant gropings" of her subjects are truly heroic. She cannot join the free spirits herself, because demon jealousy still haunts her. But, she says, "I'll be rooting and cheering for them. From the sidelines."

HITLER'S SPIES by David Kahn Macmillan; 671 pages; $16.95 For the Third Reich, military intelligence was a contradiction in terms.

If the Germans had a few brilliant successes, their World War II flops and snafus were incessant and eventually fatal.

They stole drawings, for example, of the Americans' highly successful Norden bombsight--but were unable to manufacture and install it. Hitler decided to in vade Russia with no real knowledge of the Soviet economy or military machine (the Germans were unaware of the existence of the T-34, the war's best tank, and never quite believed that D-day would occur at Normandy). Lack of undercover information did not matter greatly when the German armies were advancing through Europe. But after 1944 it was literally a matter of life and death, because intelligence is essentially a defensive game.

As David Kahn, author of the highly regarded study of cryptology, The Codebreakers, compellingly proves, espionage is the realistic assessment of possibilities; and Hitler, in whom all power centered, was a charismatic leader, not a realist. Like sharks, such leaders prosper only when they move constantly forward. To stand still, basking in certainty, is to drown.

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