Summer Reading

Tantalizing tales to beguile vacation hours

NOBLE HOUSE by James Clavell Delacorte; 1,206 pages; $19.95

Weighing in at almost four pounds, James Clavell's Noble House is literally the summer's big book, an alternative challenge for those who keep vowing to read War and Peace. Tolstoy, after all, spent his words on some 15 years of European history; Clavell covers a mere ten days in bygone Hong Kong. Sample chapter heading: "11:58 p.m."

Few contemporary writers can match Clavell's sense of place, a talent that evoked feudal Japan in Shogun. Here he recalls the febrile life of the Crown Colony in August 1963. If the countless ayeeyahs make the book occasionally sound like Terry and the Pirates, there is much to ayeeyah about: murder, kidnaping, smuggling, a fire on a floating restaurant, a typhoon and a disastrous mudslide that helps sort out the convoluted plot.

The central story locks two great financial houses, Struan & Co. (the "Noble House") and Rothwell-Gornt, in a mortal struggle. Throughout, playing off the rivals, are an American entrepreneur and his 26-year-old female partner, an executive sweet who seems a bit anachronistic for 1963. For readers who tire of bank runs and stock manipulations, the author weaves in an elaborate spy story that involves the CIA, the KGB, Britain's MI-6 and the spy networks of both Chinas. The sex is rather decorous, but for sports buffs, there are rousing horse races. And the roiling cast of characters includes people like Four Finger Wu and Good-weather Poon. Ayeeyah.

OUTSIDE OVER THERE by Maurice Sendak Harper & Row; unpaginated; $12.95

In 350 words, Maurice Sendak manages to evoke a mythic land peopled by the familiar (a mother and two daughters) and the wholly exotic (goblins and dream-scapes), where natural law, like the reader, is held in suspense. The time is the past indefinite; costumes indicate the 19th century, but there are references to the 1930s, and at one time Mozart can be seen working at a hammerklavier. Ida, the oldest girl, is given charge of her baby sister. When she grows inattentive, faceless creatures steal in and exchange the child for a simulacrum made of ice. Frantic, Ida climbs backward out her window and into the sky, tumbling through worlds of arbors and harbors, moonlight and lamplight, irrevocable loss and paradise regained. In the end the villainous goblins are revealed as babies, but in the author's view this makes them no less terrifying: What could be more incessant and demanding than an infant? At each turn, Sendak provides illustrations that refer to--and bear comparison, with--the putti of Raphael, Da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks and the entire school of German Romanticism. The sprung rhythms of the text and the richly allusive paintings do not make Outside Over There inappropriate for children. Even the very young can appreciate the work on its outer level. But only adults can wholly understand a work that has been merchandized as juvenilia and is, instead, the most unusual novel of the season.

LICENSE RENEWED by John Gardner Marek; 285 pages; $9.95

The dark hair is minutely necked with gray these days. Martinis and Balkan Sobranies are pretty much out; Perrier and filter tips are in. The Mark II Continental Bentley has been replaced by a more fuel-efficient supercar, a Saab 900 Turbo. Otherwise, since the last adventure appeared in print 16 years ago, he seems unchanged. The icy eyes and reflexes remain as quick as a cobra's; the jawline is taut, and the ability to attract supple and delectable females remains as potent as before. And while the Service has undergone reforms and shakeups as sanguinary as any that have afflicted the CIA, James Bond still covertly retains the Double0 prefix, the license to kill in the line of duty.

As literature's most celebrated spy (more than 91 million copies in 36 languages), Her Majesty's superagent continues to do what he knows best: intrigue and seduction. Bond redivivus has been entrusted to John Gardner, a British writer who knows his way around military hardware, neo-villainy and a plot whose absurdity even Ian Fleming might admire. Bond's adversary this time is Anton Murik, nuclear physicist, megamillionaire and major loon. Convinced that all nuclear power plants are hazardous, Murik wants to replace them with a design of his own. If the world complies, fine. If not, he will cause a worldwide China Syndrome. In classic style, Gardner piles picaresque on bizarre: Neanderthal henchmen, a medieval castle equipped with radar, cars that repel attackers with clouds of tear gas. Some of Bond's more ingenious widgets have been prepared by a newcomer to the Service's Q Branch: Ann Reilly, referred to by her colleagues as Q'ute. Bond fans can be assured of two things: 007 will be back, only slightly more gray-flecked. And so will Ann Reilly, only Q'uter.

DIARY OF A YANKEE-HATER by Bob Marshall Watts; 212 pages; $7.95, paperbound

THE MAN WHO BROUGHT THE DODGERS BACK TO BROOKLYN by David Ritz Simon & Schuster; 288 pages; $12.95

The strike may have emptied major league ballparks, but two of the summer's most diverting books offer ideal lineups for the stadium of the mind. In Diary of a Yankee-Hater, Bob Marshall, a Time Inc. associate counsel, recalls the New Yorkers' quirky, disappointing 1980 season.

He hurls a brushback at Reggie Jackson ("playing rightfield like he thought it would bite him"), reminisces happily about Yankee crushers like George Brett's winning homer in the playoffs, and dissects the various feuds between Owner George Steinbrenner and his players, Steinbrenner and his managers, Steinbrenner and the world. Marshall's inside pitches include a look at the locker room (the story of the first woman reporter admitted to the inner sanctum is worth the price of admission), some bright anecdotes about slumps and spitters, and enough negative gossip to make the Yankees, as always, the team America loves to hate.

The Man Who Brought the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn is a far more affectionate look at a team that might have been born of a fever dream, but was as actual and bizarre as its home town. The Dodgers were so real, says Novelist David Ritz, that they should be hauled back from the lotus land of Los Angeles to the grit of their now defunct stadium, Ebbets Field.

In the land of the adult fairy tale, where almost anything can occur, he does indeed return the Bums to New York. But not without a few obstacles, including a sanctimonious baseball commissioner, a girl who throws like Sandy Koufax and the demolition of a housing project to make way for the old stadium, resurrected brick by brick. When installed, the once and future team manages to win the pennant. But not the World Series. Ritz is a skilled and witty novelist, but he realizes that even in fantasy some dreams remain impossible.

THE SHOOTING PARTY by Isabel Colegate Viking; 195 pages; $11.95

The scene is an 8,000-acre estate in Oxfordshire. Some very upper-class English have assembled to enjoy the hospitality of their host, Sir Randolph Nettleby, and three days of partying and shooting in the crisp fall weather. The month is October and the year is 1913. A novel set in this place and time automatically creates a reserve of ready-made poignancy: the insular, comfortable people of the period had no idea what the guns of August 1914 would bring. But Author Isabel Colegate does not exploit this sentiment. The coming Great War is, naturally, a fact of which her characters are unaware, and so, except for a few vague anxieties, they cannot think of it. They have other concerns. Sir Randolph worries whether the beaters will be able to flush a sufficient number of pheasants. One of his grandsons wanders about, trying to find a lost pet duck. Some of the ladies continue or inaugurate amorous intrigues. The two best marksmen at the shooting party fall into an intense, ungentlemanly competition over who will bag the most birds.

Colegate handles her large cast of guests, servants and outsiders so that everyone seems singular, from the lord of the manor to the local poacher. When these sharply etched characters gather in the field for a hunt, they seem to inhabit a fine old photograph, illuminated from behind by an approaching flame.

TURNAROUND by Don Carpenter Simon & Schuster; 253 pages; $13.95

Turnaround proves that it is a lot cheaper to write a Hollywood novel than to make a Hollywood film. For one thing, Author Don Carpenter, 50, gets Paul Newman to make two cameo appearances without paying him a dime. The other, fictitious actors also come free. Jerry Rexford is an aspiring young screenwriter who supports himself by doing editing jobs at a trade journal called Pet Care Hotline. One of his scripts catches the attention of Rick Heidelberg, a Wunderkind director-producer desperately looking for a property that will match his first, and only, success. Heidelberg must deal with a formidable studio head named Alexander Hellstrom, who is beginning to wonder if all of his wealth and power truly means anything.

Some variant of this story has been told, filmed and staged many times: Making and Losing It in Tinseltown. Carpenter does not try to extend this formula, but neither does he take it seriously. The plot is chiefly an excuse for the author to insert some of the inside information about Hollywood that he picked up over the twelve years he worked there. He shows how deals are made, who gets the money and how easily a film project can go into turnaround, i.e., fall apart. Luckily, Carpenter's breezy, irreverent story hangs together.

ELLIS ISLAND & OTHER STORIES by Mark Helprin Delacorte; 196 pages; $10.95

Mark Helprin has the knack of creating exquisite tensions without disturbing the surface of his stories. And he understands the fabulist's task: "Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art."

This insight concludes Tamar, the story of a man who is late for a dinner party and made to sit with the children, one of whom is a beauty on the brink of womanhood. Exquisite tension, indeed. Elsewhere, a man numbed by tragedy climbs out of himself by scaling an Alp. The purpose: to recapture his humanity "in a crucible of high drama." Humanity sinks in Letters from the "Samantha, " in which the captain of a British sailing vessel rescues a reddish ape from the Indian Ocean but throws it back when the sad, manlike creature disrupts ship's business. The captain insists that the ape had no meaning and his fate no moral significance. The reader should have no trouble getting the author's drift: when the freight must be moved, the strange and rare are always expendable.

Ellis Island, the long title story, is an inspired amusement about the immigrant experience. Helprin's America is full of useful surprises, rewards and opportunities to change identities as easily as one changes socks. The protagonist, a promising and eager young writer from Eastern Europe, ricochets toward his dream of happiness. The scenes, expansive and fantastic, create an air of giddy expectancy. One would not have been surprised to find Paul Bunyan chased by Marc Chagall with a can of spray paint.

LOITERING WITH INTENT by Muriel Spark Coward, McCann & Geoghegan 217 pages; $12.95

"Dear Miss Spark, How do you do " wrote Evelyn Waugh to Muriel Spark in 1960, after delighting in three of her early novels.

Today, 13 clever and elegant novels later, the question still stands. Loitering With Intent may be as close to an answer as Spark intends to give. Her heroine, Fleur Talbot, is an English writer not unlike herself starting out in a London bed-sitter three decades ago. She takes a job as secretary to a dotty group calling itself the Autobiographical Association, and quickly progresses from helping the members with grammar to embellishing and inventing the very lives they are recounting.

All this is sketched lightly and crisply. But when the leader of the association appropriates the manuscript of Fleur's just completed novel in order to use its plot as a blueprint for manipulating the destinies of his hapless sect, Spark performs her characteristic sleight of hand. Her brisk little comedy turns out to hinge on mysteries of good and evil, reality and imagination. The feat may be done no better here than in half a dozen of her earlier novels, but it is quite enough to bear out Fleur's assertion that "everything happens to an artist: time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease."

IN SHELLY'S LEG by Sara Vogan Knopf; 248 pages; $10.95

First novelists sometimes focus their fiction at the wrong screen. That misplaced emphasis is Sara Vogan's only problem when she takes women's liberation to Big Sky country in this amusing, well-tuned novel. Shelly's Leg is a small-town Montana tavern, named for its long-dead founder, a one-legged beauty notorious for excessive dancing and drinking. Now the main patrons are Margaret, a divorced mother of two entering her 30s, and her best friend, Rita, a voluptuous Indian. They vie for the love of Woody, a drifting steel-guitar player who has all the verve of a Silly Putty peace symbol. The feminist polemics are predictable, but around this Mr. Right triangle, Vogan provides a varied and hilarious supporting cast.

Sullivan, the fiftyish, leathery proprietor, oversees the brawls and betrayals with range-war morality. To Shelly's photograph over the jukebox, he recounts their bygone love affair in captivating soliloquies, interrupted by slugs of Scotch and Maalox. He also coaches the bar's women's fastpitch Softball team, including Rita and Margaret, Shirley, a Vegas prostitute who refuses to slide because her customers would not like bruises, and a raucous bench of ranch women and factory hands. Their epic drinking and scatalogical vocabulary on and off the field do more for sexual equality than any diatribes delivered by the central antagonists. When her creations are playing ball instead of bawling (about one-third of the tune), Vogan never fails to connect. And for a rookie, .333 is not bad.

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST by Marcel Proust Random House; three volumes; $75

"For a long time I used to go to bed early." So begins one of the century's most formidable novels. For a long time the beginning was about as far as many readers cared to go. The seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past seemed endless, the characters and recollections of fin de siecle France too complex to unravel. "Maybe next summer," was the standard attitude. The excuse no longer applies. In this new set, the episodes are combined in three volumes, fresh translations and emendations added by Proust Scholar Terence Kilmartin. Even to the casual reader, Remembrance no longer seems a vast undisciplined structure; its architecture is as planned as Paris' and its cast no more arbitrary than the one in life itself.

With the rearrangement of the novel has come a reappraisal of its author. The neurasthenic in the cork-lined room is revealed as a mercilessly acute social observer, the wan dilettante as a tough-minded shaper of modern sensibility, who used nostalgia as a weapon and proved that time itself could be overborne by memory and art. If you can bring only three volumes on vacation--one witty, one profound, one tragic--this is the work to take.

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