Bookends People Like Us

The good Lord must love the nouveaux riches, because he made so many of them. He also seems to have provided a surfeit of writers to turn their freshly gilded lives into trashy novels. Among recent scribes who specialize in pressing readers' noses against the glass that separates them from the best of everything is Dominick Dunne (The Two Mrs. Grenvilles). His latest is sodden with the sort of unimaginative stock characters that have tumbled out of all the rich-and-famous pseudo fiction of the 1980s. The setting is Manhattan's Upper East Side, the pricey arena where old-moneyed families quietly count their fortunes in the millions and the newly minted are loudly working on their second billion. Crass vs. class, with the usual results: money goes far but only so far. Characters suffer fates made familiar by recent headlines and gossip columnists: a coarse financial tycoon rises and then falls in an insider-trading scandal; a TV newsman married to an aristocrat grows bored and casts off for another port; the homosexual son of one of the town's most respected families gets AIDS.

Dunne tries to dazzle with expensive brand names and superficial sociology. He deals in story threads, not plot lines. One is about revenging the murder of a young woman reminiscent of Dunne's own daughter, Actress Dominique Dunne, who was killed by her former boyfriend in 1982. A new low in exploitation.

THE PIGEON

by Patrick Suskind

Translated by John E. Woods

Knopf; 115 pages; $14.95

Jonathan Noel, 53, has been a bank guard in Paris for some 30 years. He imagines that by the time he retires, he will "assuredly be the one person in all Paris -- perhaps even in all France -- who had stood the longest time in just one place." This suits Jonathan fine. His childhood was disagreeably eventful: both parents disappeared during World War II. As a young man, he was pressured into the army and then into an unsuitable, short-lived marriage. Since then, he has carefully constructed a hermetic existence designed to protect himself from all surprises. His plan works, until the morning he discovers a pigeon staring at him in the hallway outside his attic room. The protagonist of German Author Patrick Suskind's second novel seems as commonplace as the monstrous main character of his first, the international best seller Perfume (1986), was bizarre. Such appearances are deceiving. The Pigeon is a small, unassuming paradigm of psychological terror and comedy. With remarkable grace and compression, Suskind displays a life, dismantles it and then puts it all back together again.

AN OUTDOOR JOURNAL

by Jimmy Carter

Bantam; 275 pages; $18.95

In his latest book, ex-President Richard Nixon peers at the future as of 1999. In his latest, ex-President Jimmy Carter examines the past. Both men summon up better worlds, but in An Outdoor Journal Carter has hold of a sure thing. In spare and lyrical images, he recalls a Huckleberry childhood, boating down creeks and listening to the yarns of backwoodsmen: " 'Never heerd of anybody drowning in this here swamp. The 'gators always get them first.' " The affection for a "natural setting not much changed from the way He made it" never departs. Even during visits to China and Japan, the Chief Executive ransacks local streams. In this disarming memoir, politics intrudes only once, when Carter points out that one of his last legislative acts tripled the nation's wilderness acreage. "I can understand the feeling of Henry David Thoreau," he concludes justifiably: " 'The earth was the most glorious instrument, and I was audience to its strains.' "

TWILIGHT

by Elie Wiesel

Translated by Marion Wiesel

Summit; 217 pages; $17.95

In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann removed his characters to a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium to illustrate the spiritual and intellectual malaise of the West on the eve of World War I. Elie Wiesel's Twilight looks back at the chaos and savagery of World War II through the eyes of patients at a psychiatric clinic in upstate New York. Wiesel's madmen are Jews who have biblical hallucinations and share mystical yearnings and questions raised by the Holocaust. "Why so many victims? . . . Why the indifference of the Allies? And question of questions: why the silence of God?" The author, himself a survivor of Auschwitz and the recipient of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, confronts the unanswerable by weaving together meditative stories and parables from the devastated Old World and the hopeful New. As in his previous books, Wiesel profoundly restates his themes, most notably the primacy of memory and the need to bear witness.