Bookends

THE PALACE

by Paul Erdman

Doubleday; 313 pages; $18.95

It seems like only yesterday that it was next year. Paul Erdman's The Panic of '89 was on the best-seller lists, sounding financial doom in the midst of a powerful bull market. That was, in fact, in the winter of '87, nine months before reality iced Wall Street. Erdman does not have to worry; quicker than a program trade, here he is, hedging his investments with a sixth novel. The Palace offers no scenario for economic disaster. Quite the contrary. The book is a racy tale of how one clever and gutsy (though not especially honest) fellow can rise from being a Philadelphia coin dealer to owning the splashiest gambling casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

Erdman, a former banker in Switzerland, knows all the tricks of pecuniary titillation. The main characters are all endowed with big bottom lines. Short, grubby Danny Lehman, the dubious hero, parlays his assets into fantasies of opulence, power and sex. Lehman is a loner who outwits the law and organized crime and favors the company of a hooker who reads Dostoyevsky. All things considered, he is more appealing than the run-of-the-mill Sammy Glick. Erdman's knowledge about money laundering and creative financing firmly establishes the novel's authority. An unabashed weakness for shady operators and a hearty sense of the vulgar should ensure his market share.

CROSSING OPEN GROUND

by Barry Lopez

Scribners; 208 pages; $17.95

Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams was the surprise winner of the 1986 American Book Award for nonfiction. This collection of short pieces about the American Southwest, Alaska, endangered wildlife and forgotten cultures is in the same vein. Much of the ground covered is by now well trodden, though Lopez has a light step. He glides over pre-Columbian history, kicking up bits of ornithology, geology and marine biology. His best entry is about beached whales on the Oregon coast and the peculiar behavior these leviathans caused in the local population. The author is a clear and patient observer whose literary surfaces are sometimes broken by a political ripple (the conservation policies of the Reagan Administration, for example, are found wanting, mainly because there are so few of them). Lopez offers no specific program for balancing the ecosystem. Rather, he tries to create an aura of reverence for nature that sometimes has the look of born-again paganism. With musical accompaniment by Paul Winter, a trail companion in one of the book's selections, Lopez could become a guru of the New Age movement.

CIVIL TO STRANGERS

by Barbara Pym

Dutton; 388 pages; $18.95

Toward the end of her life, British Novelist Barbara Pym (1913-1980) defined the "immortality most authors would want -- to feel that their work would be immediately recognisable as having been written by them and by nobody else. But of course, it's a lot to ask for!" Her extravagant request was answered. In this last collection -- all or parts of four unpublished novels, plus four stories and a radio talk -- the unmistakable Pym piquancy is everywhere. It mocks a self-centered woman in the 1940s as she awakens: "Something unpleasant had happened. And then she remembered. It was the war." It characterizes a Hungarian discussing the liability of touring Budapest with a husband: "You do not see the moon and the river. You are thinking only of what you shall eat." The dryly insightful spinster, an honorable role since the days of Jane Austen, is no longer in vogue; Pym was the last of the line. This and her 13 previous and richer books show how much the type is to be missed.

THE PRIZE PULITZER

by Roxanne Pulitzer with Kathleen Maxa

Villard; 241 pages; $17.95

The 1982 divorce trial of Herbert and Roxanne Pulitzer served up a succession of toothsome headlines about naughty doings among the Palm Beach rich : group sex, lesbian encounters and suggestions of unspeakable things performed with a bedside trumpet. All this was allegedly borne upon a flood tide of cocaine, Dom Perignon and money. The whole sordid story appears anew in Roxanne's latest attempt to cash in on her notoriety (previous ventures included posing nude, for $70,000, for Playboy). Readers in search of easy, sleazy entertainment, however, are in for a surprise. The narrative is shot through with the pain of any marital breakup, especially when small children are involved, and emerges as a feminist cautionary tale about the futility of devoting one's life to pleasing others. With pitiable candor the author portrays herself as a poor, under-educated country girl who thought she had no way up except through a man, and no way to hold a man except through her body, fun-loving spirit and compliance.