Bookends

RIDING THE IRON ROOSTER: BY TRAIN THROUGH CHINA

by Paul Theroux

Putnam; 480 pages; $21.95

"Grin like a dog and wander aimlessly." This gnomic advice for the wayfarer is offered by the world's pre-eminent train traveler in his wry, humorful and occasionally querulous account of a journey across China by rail. (The Iron Rooster of the title, locally known as the cheapskate express, is the train from Beijing to Urumqi.) As Theroux makes excruciatingly clear, traveling alone in the Middle Kingdom is not for the faint of heart or stomach: the food is mostly vile, the toilets are filthy, and drafty coaches are invariably crowded with unbathed passengers who yammer and spit.

But there are surprises. The author of such chronicles of nomadism as The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express has an uncanny eye for telling details and bizarre statistics -- for example, 35 million Chinese still live in caves. Theroux finds a kind of Nirvana at the end of a hair- raising side trip to Tibet -- ironically by auto, not rail. He is overwhelmed by the indomitable verve of the Tibetans, who have kept alive their culture and loyalty to the exiled Dalai Lama despite the methodical savagery of Beijing's rule. And why is Tibet such a paradise? This remote land of monks and mountains, Theroux notes, is the only area of China without trains. "I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet," he surprisingly concludes, "and then I realized that I liked wilderness much more."

THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH

by Michael Chabon

Morrow; 297 pages; $16.95

Early in this bright, funny, mannered first novel, Art Bechstein, the heterosexual hero, fresh out of college and understandably eager to postpone adulthood by whatever means necessary, talks himself into a summer of deviant fiddledeedee. "It was not as though I had any firm or fearful objection to homosexuals," he reflects when one makes an advance. "In certain books by gay writers I thought I had appreciated the weight and secret tremble of their thoughts . . . It was only that I felt keen to avoid, as they say, a misunderstanding." Ah, yes. So Art wobbles rubber-legged between Phlox, a beautiful but shallow young woman, and Arthur, a beautiful young man of fascinating secret sorrows. The pages bounce along amusingly, although a subplot involving Bechstein's father, supposedly a big-shot gangster, never makes much sense. A heterosexual reader may experience a "gack" reaction when Art reaches tenderly for the wrong sort of flesh, but that does no harm. The book's major flaw is that occasional paragraphs are too self-indulgently exquisite, as if the author had written them while wearing yellow spats.

THE SALAD DAYS

by Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

Doubleday; 431 pages; $19.95

His father was the swashbuckler of the silents and a founder of United Artists. In a memoir tinctured with candor and charm, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. recalls the most difficult vow of his youth: "Somehow I would grow up to be 'my own man.' " At 19 the male ingenue married Joan Crawford, who supplied him with "a ramrod up my backside." He demanded better roles in movies and began to hang about with Laurence Olivier and Leslie Howard. Junior enjoyed liaisons with Gertrude Lawrence and Marlene Dietrich. He also learned to act, got divorced, made a few imperishable epics like The Prisoner of Zenda and Gunga Din, remarried -- this time permanently -- and discovered a political conscience. His campaign against fascism before World War II cost him fans. After Pearl Harbor he joined the Navy as a seagoing deck officer. "What the hell had I got myself into?" is the book's exit line. The answer is obvious. He had found the role he auditioned for so frantically: his own man.

FREAKY DEAKY

by Elmore Leonard

Arbor House; 341 pages; $18.95

Elmore Leonard's Middle Western guys and dolls are now a familiar and welcome diversion, especially if you like your cop yarns humorously macabre. In Freaky Deaky, a dope dealer named Booker gets a phone call. He is told to sit down before the caller continues. He does, and is then advised that his chair has been rigged with explosives: if he gets up, he will be blown up. He does and is. Three other characters make similarly fast exits before the end of this bang-up tale about ex-hippie terrorists, a former Black Panther, a suspended Detroit policeman and an alcoholic heir to an auto-parts fortune who spends his days floating in his pool while listening to Ezio Pinza sing Some Enchanted Evening. As usual, Leonard is knowing about the criminal details, unerring in his approximations of station-house dialogue and street jive and right on when it comes to social commentary. The villain of the book, a radical in the '60s, now writes bodice-ripping romances.