Summer Reading

JAMES HERRIOT'S DOG STORIES

St. Martin's Press; 427 pages; $19.95

"I spent a lifetime treating the ailments of cows, horses, sheep and pigs, yet here I am, in my twilight years, bringing out a volume of my dog stories." So begins James Herriot's wholly unnecessary apologia. The Yorkshire vet's style is unadorned, his message is affectionate, and his four- footed characters are irresistible. Here he has gathered 50 recollections of canines, some of them sentimental, a few tragic and at least one--the story of a terrier male who abruptly becomes attractive to other males--as odd as anything in the Decameron. Herriot recalls that in his student days domestic animals were customarily listed in descending order of importance: horse, ox, sheep, pig, dog. In the latest work, he has brought his favorites to the front and given them a new leash on life.

THE NEWS FROM IRELAND

by William Trevor

Viking; 285 pages; $16.95

The good news is that the past is still very much alive in William Trevor's latest stories. As in previous collections, such as The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Lovers of Their Time, national and personal histories cast a haunting twilight over a lonely present. This works particularly well in the title story of The News from Ireland, which is set in the 1840s. That, of course, is the period of the great famine that sent more than 1 million Irish to the New World. It is also the time when a family of English Protestants named Pulvertaft arrives in Ireland to take over the house and estate of a dead relative. The sense of strangeness and dislocation that Trevor evokes in this story can be felt in today's Anglo-Irish relations. Verity in On the Zattere also feels out of joint. She is a beautiful 38-year-old woman who has accompanied her widowed father on his annual autumn trip to Venice: "Without meaning to, Verity had taken her mother's place." People in Trevor's stories do not awaken from dreams so much as they fall into the deep sleep of illusion. Nancy Simpson, the ex-chorus girl in Lunch in Winter, muses about her youth while she sits in a hotel bar waiting for the right man to come along: "She could see the stairs, where sooner or later the chap would appear. He'd buy a drink and then he'd look around and there she'd be." In Music, Justin Condon, a traveling salesman of women's underwear, sustains himself with the vision of being a romantic composer. Yet these characters do not come across as failures. Trevor makes the yearnings of ordinary people seem as significant as the accomplishments of the exceptional.

"AND SO IT GOES"

by Linda Ellerbee

Putnam; 255 pages; $16.95

Writing a book is a way for television journalists to distance themselves from the ranks of the TelePrompTered hairdos--the "twinkies," as Linda Ellerbee calls them. Ellerbee, a Texan, began her career in Houston, where her irreverent approach to office routine was not appreciated. The CBS station in New York City was delighted to have a witty, outspoken reporter on its staff, and sent her out to cover general-assignment and humaninterest stories. Eventually, she was given the chance to operate heavier machinery at NBC. She wrote for and co-anchored Weekend and NBC News Overnight, feature- journalism shows that were mostly seen in off-peak viewing hours. Yet Ellerbee seems to have had a prime time. "And So It Goes" is a breezy collection of anecdotes about covering the news both soft and hard: the circus as well as political campaigns (because she was dressed in jeans and a parka, George Bush mistook her for a network electrician). Ellerbee talks tough about the shortcomings of her profession and salty about sex and sexism at the office. The saline reporter with a whim of iron is not a pose. This month she spurned NBC's best offer to head for greener paychecks on other channels.

DEAD ROMANTIC

by Simon Brett

Scribner's; 192 pages; $13.95

Madeleine Severn, a beautiful 37-year-old schoolteacher who has been saving her virginity for the perfect moment of bliss. Bernard Hopkins, a shy but compelling middle-aged man whose wife is incurably ill. Paul Grigson, a nervous teenage boy infatuated with the teacher. From this triangle, Simon Brett has shaped a chilling psychological mystery. His cunning tale opens on the discovery of a gruesome murder, with details of the victim and perpetrator withheld. It soon develops that both must be part of the triangle, but Brett defines his characters so that any combination of killer and prey seems possible. That is a neat trick, but it is also a persuasive metaphor for Brett's underlying theme: that most of mankind is tortured by dark impulses and that chance plays a major role in determining which people actually commit crimes.

SILK LADY

by Gwen Davis

Warner; 427 pages; $17.95

Miranda--a blond Venus with overbite--and her older lover are found murdered. He is wearing shoes by Bally; hers are red leather Charles Jourdan. Anyone who thinks the cause of death is more important than who made the footgear has missed the point. With flashbacks, overheated sex scenes and brand names, Gwen Davis announces her arrival in the high-rent district of Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins: "A riveted audience at Elaine's, a heavy-breathing browsing crowd at Rizzoli's." Forget serious. The hollandaise sauce from La Cote Basque that Miranda pours over her lover, the custom-made sex apparatus that gets hoisted up the side of Watergate South because it is too big for the elevators--this is the stuff of Great Trash. In addition, there are herbal wraps at Elizabeth Arden and pokes at perfume ("Bunyan could see his obituary . . . Asphyxiated by Giorgio. Hardly fair, after he'd given up amyl nitrate"). The socially crucial pass in review: Donald Trump shows up in yet another novel. And the patrons of Le Cirque. And the Annenbergs. By now, if this were a just world, they would all be earning royalty checks.

TAMING A SEA-HORSE

by Robert B. Parker

Delacorte, Lawrence

250 pages; $15.95

In the archetypal hard-boiled private-eye novel, the cynical hero typically slept with the girls, shot the villains and kept the money. Robert B. Parker, the genre's leading writer, resurrects a more chivalric code for his beefy detective Spenser. The character's 13th adventure, Taming a Sea-Horse, puts him in grave danger on an all but unpaid quest to avenge the deaths of a prostitute he met briefly and a pimp he disliked. He confronts slick mob bosses, two-bit thugs and corrupt financiers, relying on his wits but not fearing to apply a little muscle. Parker's secondary characters are more whimsical than believable, and his dialogue a bit high-flown for the lowlifes who speak it: "What exactly is the conceptual schemata of this operation other than smut peddling, so to speak?" "We're not, as you put it, peddling smut. We're selling realized fantasy. We are marketing fully realized life- style--masculine, sexually fulfilled powerful, solid, complete." But his novels crosscut adroitly between puzzle solving and slambang action; and however much Spenser is disillusioned, he throbs with compassion.

RED

by Ira Berkow

Times Books; 302 pages; $17.95

Walter ("Red") Smith had a simple formula for sportswriting: according to his easy-to-follow directions, you just sat down at a typewriter and opened a vein. But the pain and labor were never evident in his work, and they make few appearances in this diverting but paper-deep biography. New York Times Sportswriter Ira Berkow recalls his colleague's life of affectionate domesticity and professional recognition; the conflicts remain almost out of view. What do appear are Smith's idiosyncratic columns--pieces like the study of a handicapper who prays for his horse until it breaks out in the stretch, then yells, "Thank you, Lord. I'll take him from here. Come on, you son of a bitch!" That work and others like it built Smith a following that included Ernest Hemingway, Playwright Marc Connelly and millions of other readers until Smith's death in 1982. To the end, Berkow reports, Smith's modesty remained intact. Summing up a career, he explained, "You spend a lifetime learning to find your way to the dugout at Yankee Stadium. It would be a shame to waste it."

< THE GREAT PRETENDER

by James Atlas

Atheneum; 277 pages; $15.95

Need anyone wonder why the difficulties of becoming a poet or novelist figure so prominently as the subject matter of poems and novels? There are at least as many stories out there in the world as there are people, but authors have a monopoly on the ones that get written down, and theirs tend to take precedence over the rest. Hence The Great Pretender, a first novel about a bright boy who pays sufficient dues during his literary apprenticeship to be able to write a first novel for which a title like The Great Pretender might be appropriate.

What the Germans called the Kunstlerroman and what James Joyce titled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man have pretty much become scorched earth through overuse. Still, Author James Atlas, whose biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977) earned admiring attention, invests an old story with some amusing twists. His hero Ben Janis hits adolescence during the early 1960s in Evanston, Ill., the cherished son of Jewish parents who want a better life for him. Trouble is, their life looks just fine to Ben, as do some female high school classmates who have scant interest in higher education. But Ben's father will settle for nothing less than a budding T.S. Eliot on the family tree: "He was furious when Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe. 'The man has a responsibility to the intellectuals in this country . . . We'll lose credibility.' " The lad goes off to Harvard and then Oxford, performing quite competently while wondering all the way what exactly he is doing. Not all of Ben's problems are as interesting as Atlas seems to believe, and the hero's feckless passivity does not create overwhelming suspense. But there are more than enough funny moments to make this circular journey from callow youth to immature adult worth taking.

CAMPING OUT

by Eleanor Clark

Putnam; 223 pages; $16.95

Eleanor Clark, 72, the wife of U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Penn Warren, has built her own estimable literary reputation with such works as Rome and a Villa and Baldur's Gate. Her ninth book, Camping Out, is a tour de force of minimalist storytelling, demonstrating how dizzyingly complex and satisfying an outwardly slight novel can be. Two women, old acquaintances rather than friends, take a brief canoe trip that becomes moodily romantic--a shock, if a pleasant one, to the previously heterosexual younger woman. The trip then turns terrifying when a male psychopath "befriends" them. In counterpoint are the younger woman's recollections of four generations of her warped- genteel family. Her memory album sprawls from 19th century San Francisco to postwar Italy and features a breathless narrative pace and an unerring rhythm.

MANHUNT

by Peter Maas

Random House; 301 pages; $17.95

Where did Colonel Gaddafi get the destructive wherewithal to conduct his campaign of international terrorism? From whoever would sell it to him, including a former CIA agent. In Manhunt, Peter Mass (The Valachi Papers, Serpico) recounts the tangled story of Edwin Wilson, an ex-spook turned merchant of death. During the late 1970s, Wilson sold millions of dollars' worth of arms to the Libyan leader. The deadly shipments included some 20 tons of the powerful explosive C-4, packed in five-gallon cans of oil-drilling lubricant. Wilson also organized camps to train terrorists. Meanwhile, the man who earned little more than $25,000 a year from the CIA was living on a $2 million estate in rural Virginia and had friends in high places. But influential connections could not save Wilson from a determined U.S. prosecutor named E. Lawrence Barcella Jr. Four years of investigation and legal action resulted in Wilson's conviction: he is currently serving combined sentences totaling 52 years in the federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill.

To some degree, Maas suggests, the CIA shares responsibility for Wilson's misdeeds. Originally the agency set up dummy corporations through which Wilson funneled goods and services to foreign groups deemed friendly to the U.S. But according to Maas' account, the CIA looked the other way after Wilson left the agency to become an entrepreneur. To the author, Wilson is a sort of cloak-and-dagger Great Gatsby, although there is nothing romantic about his exploits. Manhunt is about naked greed, a tale full of knaves and sociopaths pursuing a twisted dream of private enterprise.

THE FALL OF THE ROMAN UMPIRE

by Ron Luciano and David Fisher

Bantam; 326 pages; $15.95

He has bombinated about his career in the Big Leagues twice, in The Umpire Strikes Back and Strike Two. Now Ron Luciano appears as you never saw him before: unemployed. He remains funny but unbowed: "The bankruptcy went very well. I've got the car running again." By the ump's own admission, he told all of his story in the first volumes and then "ran out of my own life." But that has not stopped him from continuing to yammer. This time out, he releases some odd information ("In Cleveland (stadium) they have problems growing grass, so they paint the ground green"), remembers the greatest catch by a fan and includes the autobiographies of some less than celebrated players. Rocky Bridges: "The more I played (with the Dodgers), the more it became obvious that no one there could take a joke. My batting average." Greg Minton: Growing up, "I never even thought about playing professional baseball. I wanted to do something meaningful--I wanted to be a surfer." Marc Hill: "The team's press guide listed among the highlights of my career that 'Hill did not appear in the '83 playoffs against Baltimore.' " Luciano now claims to be seeking a political career, his first post-baseball effort without a collaborator. It is about time the arbiter learned to strike out on his own.

CINDERELLA

by Ed McBain

Holt; 262 pages; $14.95

ANOTHER PART OF THE CITY

by Ed McBain

Mysterious Press; 230 pages; $15.95

When writing his steely, intensely violent mysteries, the novelist who is otherwise known as Evan Hunter (The Blackboard Jungle, Last Summer) calls himself Ed McBain. Fans have learned that the McBain byline promises wit, shrewd plotting and downbeat realism, but also allows for great variety. His 47th and 48th books demonstrate that range. Cinderella is a gem of sting and countersting among a prostitute, a gay hairdresser, a Latin American drug king, a Mafioso, his brutal brother, and assorted innocents who get hurt. The action keeps up until the final sentence. Another Part of the City is a thriller about a sophisticated Wall Street scam and its murderous repercussions in far less swank parts of New York City. The wrongdoers are exposed, but scarcely brought to book, by an honest cop who sees connections between the deaths of a multimillionaire and a small-time restaurateur and manages to wreck his marriage through obsession with an unwinnable fight against evil.

PROVIDENCE

by Geoffrey Wolff

Viking; 217 pages; $16.95

Adam Dwyer, a respectable lawyer and descendant of a prominent Providence family, learns that he has leukemia and roughly half a year to live. Shortly after this bad news, Dwyer's house is burglarized. He is not especially surprised, given his courtroom exposures to petty crooks and his knowledge of what goes on in his hometown. But Adam's wife Clara and teenage son Ike have received a vivid impression of how scary the world can be. Worse is to follow, not only for the Dwyers but for everyone else who figures prominently in Geoffrey Wolff's fourth novel. Providence is a tangled tale, ensnarling a number of characters, including a cop and some robbers, who manage to complicate one another's lives in ways impossible to predict. Wolff does not always seem certain whether he is offering a straight thriller or an anatomy of the creeping dry rot of urban corruption. But the atmosphere is entertainingly breezy and sleazy, with a wisecracking, side-of-the-mouth narrator and some of the tightest, meanest dialogue this side of Elmore Leonard. A hired hitman recalls one of his jobs: "I got orders about the Moron. I wasn't even mad at him. I done it. I got orders; he got dead." At the very least, Providence will give readers a more enjoyable time than it does its characters.

TEFUGA

by Peter Dickinson

Pantheon; 256 pages; $14.95

Peter Dickinson is that rare novelist who is equally at home with the inward stare of psychological fiction and the outward thrust of political commentary. That duality is reflected in two themes that reverberate through most of his books: the impact of a family's guilty past and the doomed meeting of the industrialized and the underdeveloped worlds. Both themes merge, stunningly, in Tefuga, the story of a British journalist's trip to Africa to make a docudrama about his parents--a diplomat and his young artist wife whose well-meant meddling provoked a long-ago international incident. The journalist's unveiling of how colonist and native took advantage of peculiarities in the other's mental makeup provides the revelatory pleasures of a mystery. Dickinson also manages to evoke the evolution of feminism, the modern Islamization of animist tribes, the rise of media hegemony and the fall of the British empire. His descriptions are extraordinarily vivid, his characters plausibly selfish and self-deluding, and his climax is an obliquely told yet unforgettable moment of horror.

WHITES

by Norman Rush

Knopf; 150 pages; $14.95

Africa of late has seemed like nothing but bad news: famine to the north, apartheid to the south. It is easy to forget that behind the headlines life goes on there pretty much as it normally has, although what passes for daily routine on the continent may strike outsiders as magical or malign. This paradox shimmers through the six stories in Whites, Norman Rush's first book. His fictional characters live in the real Botswana, a small country sharing an uneasy border with South Africa. The arrival of black rule has ostensibly diminished the power of the British and Boers who remain, although hardly anyone, white or black, recognizes much change. What proliferates is vignettes of crossed purposes or misunderstanding between the races, with outcomes that may fall anywhere from tragedy to farce. In Bruns, a zealous Dutch do-gooder campaigns against a local tribe's rough justice, the tradition of whipping malefactors, and he outrages the whites by blaming such violence on them. Nearly everyone would like to see him go, but the method he chooses for his departure guarantees considerable disruption for those who stay. In Near Pala, two white couples drive through a desolate landscape and talk, mostly about race. The wives are sympathetic toward blacks, the husbands decidedly not. Their Land-Rover approaches three black women, one of them carrying an infant, who are pleading for water. What happens next is not the stuff of the nightly news but rather, like all of Whites, a haunting glimpse of individuals in the grip of passions and history.

MEN'S LIVES

by Peter Matthiessen

Random House; 339 pages; $29.95

This handsome and passionate volume is a knowledgeable and wholly absorbing elegy to the dying trade of commercial fishing, as practiced by a few hard- handed natives of Long Island's South Fork. Author Matthiessen, himself a professional fisherman off the high-rent beaches of East Hampton and Montauk before he went on to write of the snow leopard and Zen enlightenment, traces the rise and fall of fishing there from the earliest years of white settlement. The accents of the "Bonackers" -- the nickname comes from Accabonac Harbor -- still echo the Dorsetshire and Kentish usages of Elizabethan times. Their work is brutishly hard and ill paid, and death by drowning is a probable price of carelessness. They are beset by a powerful lobby of sport fishermen and by environmental regulations that have shut down striped-bass fishing, in part because of PCBs. Some persist anyway, and Matthiessen admires men who "value independence over security . . . protective of their freedom to the point of stubbornness, wishing only to be left alone."