Summer Reading

ZUCKERMAN BOUND by Philip Roth

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 784 pages $22.50 hardcover, $9.95 paperback

Nathan Zuckerman made his debut in Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer (1979); the hero was an earnest young author in the process of learning that art and life issued contradictory demands. By the time of Zuckerman Unbound (1981), Nathan had become absurdly rich and famous, thanks to a scandalous best-selling novel that estranged him from his father and the rest of his family. Zuckerman's punishment came in The Anatomy Lesson (1983), in which he appeared as a neurasthenic wreck hoping to start life all over again as a medical student.

Zuckerman Bound offers the convenience of all three novels in one volume and something else besides. Roth has added a novella-length epilogue to Nathan's saga called The Prague Orgy. For reasons he does not fully understand, a ( rejuvenated Zuckerman finds himself in Czechoslovakia, trying to obtain a manuscript of Yiddish stories, written by someone both unknown and deceased, to take back with him to the U.S. The writers and artists he meets in Prague have all been silenced and repressed by the government. Sex is their outlet and anodyne. Zuckerman wants to discuss literature; his hosts want him to join in the fun. Anomalies multiply, while the American's mission rapidly descends toward fiasco.

The Prague Orgy is a fitting capstone to Roth's trilogy, an achievement that seems even more impressive whole than it did piecemeal. Zuckerman Bound proves that no one now writing can be funnier and, at the same time, more passionately serious than Philip Roth.

LAST LETTERS FROM HAV

by Jan Morris

Random House; 203 pages; $14.95

In an epilogue to Journeys, published

last year, Travel Writer Jan Morris said her valedictory to cities. "I may go upstream," she wrote airily, "or strike into the mountains." Yet here she is on the shadowy streets of a once grand Mediterranean trading and resort metropolis, "a little compendium of the world's experience, historically, aesthetically, even perhaps spiritually."

At every turn, Hav's storybook past collides with the neon present. The annual Roof Race, Europe's oddest sporting event, sends multinational Havians sprinting across the peeling ruins left by Athenian, Czarist and British occupations. Noel Coward and Nijinsky played here in Hav's heyday; Nazis hid out among its elite residents. Present-day Havians are baffling shadows. The last pretender to the Turkish caliphate, a principal shareholder in Hav TV, tries to marry Morris to his vizier. She sips coffee with a Chinese financial pirate and recognizes a bartender at the opulent casino from his days at Harry's Bar in Venice. "I know of nowhere in the world," she writes, "where the purpose of life seems so ill-defined."

In the end, Hav's delicious essence remains as elusive as its geography. Although Morris keeps a straight phrase, Hav is not discernible in any atlas or gazetteer. Look for it about halfway between Oz and Lilliput.

FALL FROM GRACE

by Larry Collins

Simon & Schuster; 475 pages; $17.95

Powerful German forces near Calais could have been shifted to Normandy in time to throw the Allies back into the sea on D day. They were not, because the German command, on evidence provided by its own espionage agents, expected the imminent arrival of some 1 million U.S. and Canadian troops. This huge force, in fact, did not exist. It had been made to seem real by months of fake radio chatter, by inflatable rubber tanks and guns set out in fields to fool aerial reconnaissance, and by the eyewitness reports of German spies, all of whom were under Allied control.

This grand deception was the subject of Ken Follett's 1978 page turner, The Eye of the Needle, but it is given a fresh twist in Larry Collins' shrewdly detailed spy novel. His story presumes that British intelligence dropped agents into the Calais area to organize what would seem to be pre-invasion sabotage by the Resistance--and then betrayed its own heroes to the gestapo so that German generals would draw the obvious inference. Double and triple agents prowl through Collins' dark fiction, whose heroine is a heartbreakingly beautiful French-English operative named Catherine. All official papers about the intelligence office that would have conducted such an operation have in fact been destroyed or sequestered, so it seems unlikely that the questions raised by the author, of hideous treachery for the higher good, will ever be answered.

HARD MONEY

by Michael M. Thomas

Viking; 451 pages; $17.95

The pop novel of Big Business contains immutable ingredients: the perfunctory gray-flannel bodice ripping, for example, and the somewhat livelier frolicking in the greenmail by silicon-souled Harvard M.B.A.s. What this diverting work adds is an irreverent attitude toward high corporate boodlers, who are usually flattered by publicists and vaguely feared as large, distant predators by everyone else. To Author Thomas, a business journalist and former investment banker who seems to know his stuff, the financial sharks are so many Babbitts in $900 suits. Their laquered second wives are devoted to the sort of conspicuous lunching that, if really successful, is recorded in the columns. Their favorite politician, U.S. President Eldon Erwitt, beloved because his Eldonomics has made the world safe for greed, is an air-headed former TV announcer.

The considerable fun of the book is Thomas' deft and knowledgeable caricatures of these crass types. The plot involves the heroic efforts of a retired communications mogul to recapture his old television network, and to use it not only to rid the nation of the deplorable President Erwitt, but --here Thomas lapses into fantasy--to improve the quality of TV programming. This wistfulness becomes believable only at the end, when the uprising fails and mediocrity triumphs.

A CATSKILL EAGLE

by Robert B. Parker

Delacorte; 311 pages; $14.95

About a fifth of the way into his 13th and best mystery novel, Robert B. Parker explicitly acknowledges what he is up to: he seeks to re-create, in contemporary context, the medieval quest. In A Catskill Eagle, his hard-boiled detective, Spenser, vows to rescue a maiden imprisoned in a tower. But the modern world, with its complexities ranging from feminism to the military- industrial complex, has all but nullified the chance for such straightforward valor. The "maiden" is Spenser's estranged girlfriend, Susan Silverman; her supposed captor is Spenser's rival for her love; her disappearance may in fact be voluntary; her guards are also employees of an unscrupulous international arms dealer; the macho Spenser must rely on help from a lesbian journalist and a matronly psychotherapist; and the perilous rescue turns into a wantonly bloody and ignoble business, achieved with the connivance of morally dubious U.S. Government agencies.

Parker allows Spenser full awareness of these conundrums without turning the man of action into an egghead, and brings off the baroque and potentially murky tale with characteristic clarity, humor and excitement.

SKELETON CREW

by Stephen King

Putnam; 512 pages; $18.95

Anyone who announces the arrival of another book by Stephen King should speak quickly and get out of the way. King's loyal and extensive readership will stampede toward the author's work, even when, as is the case with the recent best-selling novel Thinner, it is offered under a pseudonym. Nothing whatever in Skeleton Crew, a collection of 22 stories written over the past 19 years, will disappoint his presold constituents.

If King's formula were as easy to imitate as it is to describe, all writers might be millionaires. Yet he is the prevailing master in the horror-lit racket because his work hardly ever seems calculated or artificial. The Mist begins: "This is what happened. On the night that the worst heat wave in northern New England history finally broke--the night of July 19--the entire western Maine region was lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen." The novella-length story is an exercise in escalating gruesomeness, and the urgency and awkwardness of the narrative lend credence to the preposterous. So does the setting, a supermarket where a random bunch of shoppers have been trapped by what may be the end of the world. Familiar brand names anchor the incredible; a flying monster invades the store and is set on fire by the beleaguered defenders, finally crashing "into the spaghetti sauces, splattering Ragu and Prince and Prima Salsa everywhere like gouts of blood." King's private lines to primal nightmares and American consumerism remain in good working order.

MAILER: HIS LIFE AND TIMES

by Peter Manso

Simon & Schuster; 720 pages; $19.95

Oral history has long been recognized as a legitimate and fertile form. But what about oral biography? Well, when it concerns Norman Mailer, the enduring enfant terrible, perpetual showman, seigneurial collector of wives and children, and protean writer, it amounts to a genre all by itself. Journalist Peter Manso sets out the lengthy musings of friends and enemies, editors and critics--almost anyone who has anything significant to say and some who do not--including Mailer's overprotective mother ("Running for mayor (of New York) was a mistake, and I told him, 'You don't understand all the spiteful things people do to someone who's running for mayor' ").

At some 700 pages, this is probably more than most people want to know about Mailer, especially when the talk winds down to details of book contracts and postponed deadlines. But there are priceless private scenes: Mailer asking his mother to judge which of five obscenities is the strongest, for example, and a sobering public confrontation when the author meets a hostile press after testifying for Jack Henry Abbott in the ex-convict's trial for the murder of Richard Adan, a Greenwich Village waiter. Mostly the book is grand gossip, a sort of Portable Hamptons, Everyman's own private literary soiree for a long afternoon in the hammock.

THE LEATHERSTOCKING TALES

by James Fenimore Cooper

Library of America; 2,398 pages in

2 volumes; $27.50 each

Mark Twain for the prosecution: "Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig . . . the Leatherstocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series." D.H. Lawrence for the defense: "Fenimore Cooper has probably done more than any writer to present the Red Man to the white man." For the reader: the Library of America, offering The Leatherstocking Tales in all their flawed glory.

Both critics have a point; Cooper's characterization of Natty Bumppo, the sharpshooter who boasts, "What I can see, I can hit at a hundred yards, though it were only a mosquitoe's eye," shuttles uneasily from stolid frontiersman to animated cartoon. Yet the surrounding Delaware, Iroquois and Sioux are presented for the first time as complex beings with heroic as well as villainous traits. It took another century to amplify the efforts of Cooper, whose unacknowledged voice can still be heard in romantic protest literature and films. If his works now seem closer to scenarios than to novels, so be it. They remain the most diverting westerns available without a VCR.

LOVE ALWAYS

by Ann Beattie

Random House; 247 pages; $16.95

Ann Beattie's third novel is set in Vermont, which seems to most of her characters only a short ego trip away from Manhattan and Los Angeles. The new publisher of Country Daze, a Perrier-and-lime sort of publication, remarks: "I discriminate enough to know who means most to me. I mean most to me." So, apparently, does everyone else. Lucy Spenser, who writes a Miss Lonelyhearts column for the magazine under the pen name Cindi Coeur, is having a sporadic affair with her editor Hildon and trying to figure out why her old friend Les dumped her. Lucy's summer is further disrupted by the arrival of her niece Nicole, a teenage star of the TV soap opera Passionate Intensity. Others follow in Nicole's sudsy wake, including a writer working on a novelization of Nicole's program and an artist making models for a Nicole doll that must go on the market soon, while the original is still famous.

Beattie keeps the pace of her story brisk and the atmosphere antic but genial. People who assume that TV and gossip columns can bestow meaning on their lives might come in for criticism in some quarters. Not here. Reading Love Always is as easy and relaxing as watching a field of fireflies at dusk.

THE INTERNATIONAL GARAGE SALE

by Stefan Kanfer

Norton; 224 pages; $13.95

"History occurs twice," Stefan Kanfer writes at the outset of The International Garage Sale, quoting Karl Marx, "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." Some 200 pages later, many of them stingingly funny, Kanfer ends his novel invoking the same message. Yet the novel itself lies somewhere on the continuum between tragedy and farce. Ostensibly it is a sardonic burlesque of the United Nations (here thinly disguised as the World Body) and its present-day cast of characters, but underneath runs a current of sadness that the ideals of the 1940s have been overrun by the travesties of the '80s. One veteran envoy, producing an old Esperanto primer, even remembers when "one universal language would make war obsolete."

In the cacophony of today's voices, Kanfer, a senior editor of TIME, invents some delightful ones of his own: an aging sleight-of-hand artist called the Wizard, who sets up a fake country; an oil-rich emir who produces a TV sitcom to sell his political message with reworked Borscht Belt shtick; a splendidly confused interpreter who adores women's legs and finds his paradise among the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. Serious evil--the garage sale of the title --lurks here too, and the hero, a TV newsman, finds, as so many innocent investigators do these days, that iniquity, like cream, rises to the top. But neither he nor Kanfer is completely daunted. In this zany and touching book, the author laughs all the way to hope.

IN CUSTODY

by Anita Desai

Harper & Row; 204 pages; $16.95

Art may be long and life short, as the adage goes, but not for the aged New Delhi writer at the center of this compassionate comic novel. Nur, the greatest poet of the dying Urdu language, has outlived his gift--his last poems are 15 years behind him--but not his rather tattered legend. Half blind, often drunk, he plays up to the bohemian rabble who hang around him, endures the squabbling of his two wives and waits, if not for death, then for some form of deliverance. Enter Deven, a poetry-smitten young lecturer from a provincial college. Assigned to tape the master's verse and reminiscences for a literary magazine, Deven presents himself as a fervent, though hopelessly ineffectual, acolyte.

The encounter at first yields melancholy farce, richly rendered by Delhi- based Novelist Anita Desai (this is the India you missed while watching The Jewel in the Crown and A Passage to India). The naive Deven seems no match for Nur, but the situation pivots on the question of who, finally, is in custody to whom. Nur begins urgently pressing his needs upon Deven--money, medical care, the education of a son. Frantic, Deven asks himself, "In taking Nur's art into his hands, did he have to gather up the stained, soiled, discoloured and odorous rags of his life as well?" The answer, Desai makes clear, is yes, and the way Deven responds to this crushing truth is both plausibly surprising and stirring.

SUNRISE WITH SEAMONSTERS

by Paul Theroux

Houghton Mifflin; 365 pages; $18.95

Once, when Paul Theroux was living in Indonesia "among some of the poorest people I have ever seen in my life," he was commissioned to review John Updike's Rabbit Redux. The novel's account of suburban problems seemed remote and trivial: "To say that I took a dim view of Rabbit is an understatement," he recalls in the introduction to this sprightly roundup of fugitive pieces. The "far too cruel" review shows the writer's patented amalgam of myopia, crankiness and readability.

It must be said that Theroux is just as hard on himself as he is on his competitors--and the world around him. He has left the pieces in chronological order from 1964 to 1984, creating a portrait of a writer growing up, sharing first his wonderment that it can get terribly cold in Africa, and learning at last that he cannot outrow the currents of Nantucket Sound in a tiny skiff. The journeys are inside and out: reflecting on his own unscholarly past at a high school reunion; fleeing a New England hurricane by taking a train halfway around the U.S. He does not flinch from strong opinions: Hemingway is "a destroyer"; high school sports are "a drug far worse than marijuana." Kipling, he acknowledges, believed "in the salvation of imperialism, and any number of his stories and poems indicate his hatred for certain races or groups of people." Yet Theroux finds him irresistible.

He exhorts a traveling companion in Africa to forsake the camera for the eye, but in two other essays lauds photography both for its depth of realistic detail and its ability to create exotic illusions. In this book, Theroux serves as both the camera and the eye, and both the detail and the illusions are developed with brilliance.

HER FIRST AMERICAN

by Lore Segal

Knopf; 287 pages; $15.95

The dust jacket reproduces part of a mural by Thomas Hart Benton: City Activities with Subway. A woman stands while four men sit, ignoring her. One reads a tabloid whose back-page headline blares: BANKER'S LOVE NEST. What is wrong with this picture? The paper, of course: the last page of a tabloid always reports sports; it is the front page that broadcasts scandal. This quirky distortion of actuality echoes the work within. Ilka Weissnix is a Viennese greenhorn entering post-World War II America with a few sentences of English, an open face and beautiful legs. She soon encounters Carter Bayoux, a < doomed journalist with several distinguishing characteristics: he is overweight, brilliant, alcoholic and black.

This volatile mixture forms the substance of tragicomedy and fills it with asides that are, like the tabloid, just slightly askew: " 'My ex-wife . . . was a bitch.' Ilka thought that's what she wanted to be--a bitch and a looker. Think of the opportunities!" The voluble, repetitious Bayoux cannot match her lunatic poignancy, but he can be an apt foil and in the end helps to prove that the immigrant novel, from Henry Roth's Call It Sleep to Isaac Bashevis Singer's Lost in America to Lore Segal's Her First American, remains inexhaustible.