Summer Reading

Vacation volumes mix memory, humor and suspense

THE BLUE-EYED SHAN by Stephen Becker

Random House; 270 pages; $13.50

An American anthropologist named Greenwood spends several years with the Shan people in Pawlu, a tiny village near the border between China and Burma. He marries and fathers a daughter before news of World War II belatedly reaches him, driving him from his remote adopted home to join the U.S. Army and the larger struggle. In 1949, back in the U.S., he receives a letter from Yang Yulin, a wartime comrade who is now a general in the Chinese Nationalist army. Yang has got hold of an anthropological treasure, the bones of Peking Man. He will flee the advancing Communist troops and turn over the relics to Greenwood. They must meet at Pawlu.

Thus begins an absolutely ripping adventure. Author Stephen Becker, 55, keeps the action fast and the background crammed with details. He meticulously evokes the rhythms of village life, the rituals of a people cut off from the rest of the world. The convergence of Greenwood and General Yang poses a threat to that secure isolation. Eventually, Pawlu is surrounded by a group of mutinous Chinese soldiers and a marauding band of headhunters. Greenwood must choose between defending the village or earning lasting fame as the rescuer of the Peking Man. The Blue-Eyed Shan completes a trilogy of novels set in the Orient that the author began with The Chinese Bandit (1975) and The Last Mandarin (1979). The new book stands on its own but also adds considerably to the vivid pageant of the East that Becker has been creating. Read together, all three tales would more than compensate for the rainiest week at the beach.

FOR SPECIAL SERVICES by John Gardner Coward, McCann & Geoghegan 298 pages; $9.95

In his second appearance with British Thriller Writer John Gardner as his author, James Bond remains irresistible to women and, considering his advancing age, pretty agile outside the boudoir.

The current caper revives SPECTRE, the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, which Bond supposedly felled years ago, along with its malevolent leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. SPECTRE is determined this time around to gain control of outer space. Its machinations include a wave of hijackings for huge ransoms and the manufacture of ice cream spiked with a mind-bending drug. Bond and the luscious daughter of an old colleague man age to penetrate the organization's 150-sq.-mi. Texas ranch headquarters, only to face death at the hands of killer ants, man-eating pythons and other unfriendlies. At times, Gardner's stolid prose style makes one long for Ian Fleming's insouciance. Still, it is good to watch England's last knight jousting with villains who make the Falkland Islands seem 2 million miles from M.

IN THE HEAT OF THE SUMMER by John Katzenbach Atheneum; 312 pages; $13.95

Few things on a daily newspaper are quite so exciting as a juicy murder--except a series of juicy murders. After covering the savage shooting of a teenager for his Miami paper, Reporter Malcolm Anderson gets a call from the killer, who casually reveals that he plans to take more lives. He keeps his word. In the course of four execution-style killings, each more bizarre than the last, Anderson becomes an instant superstar of his profession. At the same time, he becomes so obsessed with the murders, and the man who commits them, that he is less an observer than part of the story. Novelist John Katzenbach, a reporter for the Miami Herald, conveys both the slipperiness and liveliness of a hot story in fast, clean prose that also captures the explosiveness of Miami in what the natives call the "mean season." This promising first novel also shows a fine eye for character and the ways of the law--a subject to which the author, as the son of Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, a former U.S. Attorney General, could be said to have been born.

THE MAN WHO LIKED SLOW

TOMATOES by K.C. Constantine

Godine; 177 pages; $12.95

Only one man has ripe tomatoes in western Pennsylvania in mid-June.

He turns up dead. It is up to Mario Balzic, the profane, long-suffering, wine-bibbing Serbo-Italian police chief, to make the connection. In fact, as readers of previous Balzic mysteries can attest, nothing goes down in the little mining town of Rocksburg that Balzic does not know about. In Tomatoes he is bothered by drug runners, the more than customary asininity of officialdom, and a police union as obstinate as he is. Mostly, Balzic prides himself on his skill at solving DDs: domestic disturbances that account for most of the carnage on his turf. "The trick is looking like there's something wrong with you," he says, "like you got a hernia or something or a bad back or one leg shorter than the other, anything to make 'em think you can't hurt 'em . . . they'll tell you anything."

Author Constantine, who lives in a place like Rocksburg, cuts close to the bone of small-town tedium and comes up with osso bucco. His dialogue sounds as if he had spent years with a tape recorder in an Italian grocery. The quirky Balzic is as good and true a member of his fallible profession as any fictional policeman now in service. He also has taste without snobbery, as witness his penchant for Robert Mondavi's California wines.

ENGLAND HAVE MY BONES by T.H. White

Putnam; 306 pages; $13.95

As the author recounts it in this delightful diary, England in the '30s was a wholly owned subsidiary of Eden. The evenings sound with the calls of nightingales, thrushes, plovers and owls; the rivers brim with trout; and the towns are peopled by honest peasants and serene aristocrats. One recalls a nobleman's dispensation of whisky to his neighbor's yeomanry. "Unfortunately, he forgot to provide water .. . 'We had to drink it or perish miserably of thirst' . . . It took a full week-end before the last of them had found his way home." White analyzes the philosophy of fishing in a style that Izaak Walton might envy, and his descriptions of dartboard arcana and Welsh superstitions belong on the shelf alongside Dickens. Another, smaller book could be made of his observations: "The stomach is really the basis of nationalism." "The infallible test for a gentleman is to drop in on him unfed, and see what he does about it." "Dogs, like very small children, are quite mad." Only one aperc,u seems false:

"The trouble about life is there is never time to do anything in it." For White (1906-64), there was: time to learn, and to commemorate an England that now has his soul. Readers have his rewards.

UNCIVIL LIBERTIES by Calvin Trillin

Ticknor & Fields; 206 pages; $10.95

Squirreled away in his safe-deposit box, Calvin Trillin keeps a list of prominent novelists who once sported Nehru jackets. Occasionally, he will take out this list and peruse the names the way a stamp collector savors his Luxembourg misprints. That is precisely what readers ought to do with Trillin's essays in Uncivil Liberties, originally written for the Nation from 1911 to 1951.

These ironic, deceptively light pieces touch on everything from weddings ("The quality of the food is in inverse proportion to the social position of the bride and groom") to social philosophy ("Nostalgia is fueled by inflation"). Trillin finds that American satirists live in "constant danger of being blindsided by the truth." His twofold defense against that danger: to reduce large questions to the microscopic (President Reagan named as his Surgeon General a doctor once known as "the Tummy Tuck King of Palm Beach") and to enlarge the trivial to the grotesque ("Am I the only person who favors a law mandating life imprisonment for anyone who performs in public as a mime?").

FAMILY MATTERS by Burton Bernstein Summit; 200 pages; $13.95

Some family. Shirley is a theatrical producer and literary agent. Burton is a celebrated biographer and New Yorker staff writer. And their older brother? Who else? Lenny, the conductor, lecturer, composer and 63-year-old Wunderkind. Family Matters follows all the Bernsteins from obscurity to celebrity, traveling the pull of Lenny's powerful slipstream. As Burton tells it, the early conditions were not propitious for fame. Sam, the father, was a successful businessman, a manic-depressive and a parochial ethnocentric (in later years he would refer to Dwight Eisenhower as General Eisenberg and to Adlai Stevenson as Steve Adelson). He did not regard music as an occupation for a nice Jewish boy, and along the way he made life miserable not only for his children but for his wife Jennie, who nevertheless stayed married to him for over half a century, until his death at 77. The parental crossfire caused the children to retreat into a private world of secret names and words and In jokes that nourished them until they were able to break free. Yet, in the custom of many first-generation Americans, Burton now digs at his roots with forbearance, humor and a strange affection. Judging from Burton's intriguing confessional, what saved the young Bernsteins from bitterness and obscurity was not surviving with a genius, but a collective genius for survival.

THE GIRL OF THE SEA OF CORTEZ by Peter Benchley Doubleday; 237 pages; $13.95

Just when everyone thought it was safe to go back into bookstores, here comes the opening image of Peter Benchley's new novel: "The girl lay on the surface of the sea, looking into the water through a mask, and was afraid." This time, though, the menace is misleading. The author of Jaws has produced a simple story that is longer on charm than chills. Paloma, 16, lives on an island in the Sea of Cortez (the Gulf of California) and mourns her drowned father. For comfort, she spends her days skindiving at the secret place he had shown her: a seamount, or underwater volcanic formation, where an astonishing variety offish gather and feed.

The villain of the piece does not lurk in the depths but rides the surface. Paloma's brother Jo discovers her spot and decides, with his two companions, to cast his fishing nets there. She cannot stop them or prevent news of the find from reaching all the other fishermen in her village. But she bumps into an improbable ally: a giant manta ray that seems as interested in preserving the seamount as she is. Lest credulity be overstrained, a dust-jacket photograph shows Author Benchley riding on the back of a manta ray. If he can do it, so, presumably, can Paloma. Such authentication is really unnecessary. The Girl of the Sea of Cortez is an underwater morality play with a happy ending. Fabulous events do not seem unbelievable when they occur in a fable.

THE GRANDES DAMES by Stephen Birmingham

Simon & Schuster; 299 pages; $15.50

Some regard them as parvenues, pouter pigeons or Gorgons. To Stephen Birmingham, a writer with an affinity for chronicling the vagaries of the rich ("Our Crowd"; The Right People) they are The Grandes Dames, women who ruled society from the 1880s to the eve of World War II. This bemused, anecdotal history follows the parabolas of such great and sometimes terrifying socialites as Bostonian Isabella Gardner. The recipient of letters from Henry James, Emerson and Whittier could have sprung from the pages of Alice in Wonderland. She envied but one person in the world: the Dowager Empress of China "because, when someone displeased her, she could order, 'Cut off his head.' " In Cincinnati, a society reporter named Marion Devereux had incalculable influence over everything but her own prose style. A woman's gown was her "toilette"; on several occasions she referred to an enemy's appearance in a "lovely bead neckless"; bachelors were referred to as "young celibrates."

Eleanor Belmont, a former actress and wife of Millionaire August, hired Houdini to be handcuffed, bound with ropes and chains and dropped overboard from the family yacht, merely to divert some friends. Toward the end of her career, she was heard correcting the upright novelist John P. Marquand for his lack of taste and reticence.

Time and mores have endangered the breed, but as Birmingham points out, that is no reason for celebration. These rich women, with their whims of iron and their vast influence, were not simply figureheads presiding over doomed estates. With few exceptions they used their wealth generously; hardly a major museum or opera house could survive today without their contributions and stewardship. The IRS has taken many of the Grandes away, but the Dames persist.

FLANAGAN'S RUN by Tom McNab Morrow; 444 pages; $14.50

It is the summer of 1931. Millions are unemployed. What people need is something to take their minds off the Depression. Charles C. Flanagan, a flamboyant character composed of equal parts of FT. Barnum, Texas Guinan and unadulterated chutzpah, conceives of a marathon to end all marathons, a 3,000-mile foot race that begins in the Los Angeles Coliseum and ends, months later, in New York's Central Park. To make it interesting, he offers $300,000 in prize money.

Tom McNab, a Glasgow-born track man who served as script consultant for the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire, makes the marathon seem real as he assembles a memorable cast, including a snake-oil salesman, a determined Scot, an underweight Mexican and such historical folks as Al Capone, members of the Industrial Workers of the World and a handful of Hitler Youth. On the way, Flanagan's Run captures the masochistic ecstasy of long-distance running. No one who runs, walks or just sits in an armchair and reads will fail to cross McNab's taut finish line.

ME AGAIN by Stevie Smith

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 360 pages $15.95

When she was three, Stevie Smith's family moved to a small house in Palmers Green, London, and there she stayed for more than 60 years, first with her parents and then with a "Lion Aunt." Her vibrant inner life, like Emily Dickinson's, was hidden from public view, clothed in spinsterish rectitude. Some recognition came during her lifetime, but Smith's Collected Poems did not appear in the U.S. until five years after her death in 1971. Now her fugitive pieces have been gathered in this overdue collection.

The fiction provides the strongest instances of her virtuosity. She can be saline: "What a pleasant holiday this was, how much she had enjoyed today . . . hitting Hughie had also been quite agreeable." She can be feisty about acquaintances who object to being mentioned in tier books: "You go into houses under cover of friendship and steal away the words that are spoken." She can also effortlessly slip in and out of Joycean narrative: 'Ah,' cries the sad beldame, transfixed n grotesque crucifixion upon the perambulator, stabbing at herself with a hatpin . . . so that a little antique blood may fall upon the frilly pillow . . ." As this compendium reveals, there were many Stevie Smiths beneath the public persona. If one of them saw death as "end and remedy," another welcomed the phenomenon of works that outlast the worker. Me Again is one of these.

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