Ed And Helen DESTINY

By Paul Gray

Bantam Books bought the privilege of publishing Destiny for $1,015,000, "a sum," its publicity release announces, "greater than the combined advances earned by Stephen King, James Michener, Sidney Sheldon and Danielle Steel for their first novel." Aside from the tantalizing but possibly erroneous suggestion of a King-Michener-Sheldon-St eel collaboration, there is not much to celebrate. For one thing, a cool million no longer induces the slack-jawed awe it once did; everyone knows that insider traders on Wall Street can steal that much before lunch. And British Author Sally Beauman is not really a first novelist. She has written nine Harlequin romances under a pseudonym.

Still, seven-figure advances can cause frissons in the worlds of publishing and journalism, where the hired hands ordinarily labor for far less. Destiny will be talked about, doubtless picked up by a few people new to the current state of the romance genre and hence ignorant of just how wretched such fiction is required to be. There will be cries of disbelief; Sally Beauman may want her pseudonym back.

Destiny offers a hero, Edouard, who has more vowels in his name than seem strictly necessary, and a heroine, Helene, who suffers from a superfluity of accent marks in hers. A lot of ink is wasted just getting these characters on the page. Given its initial investment, Bantam might have urged Beauman to save money by calling her romantic leads Ed and Helen. Anyhow, Edouard is impossibly rich and handsome; Helene is impossibly beautiful; together they are . . . a word comes to mind but then vanishes in the general miasma of implausibilities and sex, which is regularly rapturous and accompanied by sensations "smothering any ability to think."

But no thinking is really required: Destiny is far too slick and mechanical for that. True trash buffs like to watch authors sweat over simple declarative sentences. Beauman, 42, who has written a history of the Royal Shakespeare Company, published by Oxford University Press, is not a ninny. During this interminable exercise in the imbecilic, it is possible to perceive a writer who knows better, sneering at her readers and laughing all the way to the exchequer.