Summer Reading

ALASKA

by James A. Michener

Random House; 868 pages; $22.50

Unhook the phone! Sling the hammock!

Cast off all brunches! Alaska, James A. Michener's latest titanic adventure novel, promises to transport vacationing readers through billions of years and thousands of scenic miles. The Michener word factory can always be counted on to produce an August fact-pack, and Alaska represents the state of this honorable craft. This mother lode of incident and peril begins with woolly mammoths and the Stone Age Athapascans who crossed the straits from Siberia some 29,000 years ago and ends with daring 1980s bush pilots who bring basketball backboards and lawyers to oil-rich Eskimos in the wilderness. Besides multiple heroes and heroines, there are knaves and opportunists who have depleted Alaska's resources and contributed to the high rates of alcoholism and suicide. One of Michener's favorite words is noble, but after mushing through his Arctic saga of persistence and greed, one is not surprised that he uses it mainly to describe grizzly bears, salmon and whales.

A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON

by Muriel Spark

Houghton Mifflin; 189 pages; $17.95

There is usually a point in a Muriel Spark novel where the reader realizes that what has seemed as blithe and airy as a minuet is also a struggle for mortal stakes. In A Far Cry from Kensington it is when Spark's beguiling narrator, Mrs. Hawkins, a fat young widow who is an editor in a publishing house, explains her uncontrollable penchant for blurting out costly truths: "It feels like preaching the gospel." Her penetrating innocence is pitted against the corruption of the hack writer and phony spiritualist Hector Bartlett, whose machinations pervade her working life and even the boardinghouse where she lives. Spark's setting -- London's genteel bohemian neighborhoods during the threadbare years after World War II -- is precisely and lovingly evoked. Among a host of vivid minor characters, one successful novelist could stand for the author: "She had wit, on some occasions magic." This, for Spark, is one of those occasions.

WHERE I'M CALLING FROM

by Raymond Carver

Atlantic Monthly Press

391 pages; $19.95

Raymond Carver writes about marriage, about domesticity, about the wear and tear of daily intimacy, especially when his characters are drunk. And his stories are zingers. The titles set the mood of emotional frazzle: they are often either provoking shards of dialogue (Put Yourself in My Shoes, They're Not Your Husband) or freighted single words (Fever, Fat, Careful). Most of these tales are culled from four previous books, with seven new entries. Of the latter, Elephant is a grimly funny catalog of woe from the soft touch in a remorseless family that lives on loans. None of the new material, however, has quite the impact of the best old stories. Feathers is a marvel, 18 pages that contain as many true surprises as a protracted piece of trickery by John Fowles. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love gets to the heart of sexual passion and its black aftermath. Both stories place an established couple in a charged, awkward confrontation with another couple -- a Carver specialty. He is 50 now, and considered a hot writer; 25 years after he began fashioning these tough, unliterary works, they are being picked up eagerly as emblems of late-'80s rue.

SILVER

by Hilma Wolitzer

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

324 pages; $18.95

As her 25th wedding anniversary approaches, Paulie Flax, a household-hints columnist for her local suburban newspaper, views her marriage to Howard, who years ago traded in his jazz saxophone for a Long Island recording studio, with unfaltering logic: the passion has gone out of their union; therefore she must leave him. But fate intervenes, as it always does in a comedy of mores. When Howard suffers a heart attack, Paulie sets aside her resolve -- until she uncovers his passing liaison with a would-be Mme. de Pompadour of the shopping malls. That propels her into New York City, where Son Jason, a punk-rock musician who lives in a Bronx tenement, and his pregnant girlfriend Flame, nee Sara, add to the imbroglio. But, after all manner of marital peccadilloes, Wolitzer (In the Palomar Arms) spins her fifth novel into a bittersweet tribute as the Flaxes finally celebrate their anniversary. "We waltzed around the perimeters of the living room," Paulie recalls, "the winners in an arduous marathon dance."

A THIEF OF TIME

by Tony Hillerman

Harper & Row; 209 pages; $15.95

Some people read Tony Hillerman for the murders. He is, after all, president of the Mystery Writers of America. Others read him for his human interest: in A Thief of Time, his detective, Joe Leaphorn, is coping with his wife's death and his impending retirement. But Hillerman's most striking virtue is his evocation of the Southwest: the barren, craggy land and the complex social interactions between whites and Native Americans and among mutually mistrustful Navajo, Hopi and Apache. Here the plot centers on traditionalists who want to preserve ancient burial places, anthropologists and archaeologists who seek to study them, and "pot hunters," who pillage the sites for quick profit. Hillerman offers plenty of surprise and danger. But what lingers is the scenes of digging by moonlight and the diggers' reveries about the mysterious Anasazi, who went to such trouble to honor their dead a millennium ago. Careful with the facts, A Thief of Time nonetheless transmutes knowledge into romance.

SUBJECT TO CHANGE

by Lois Gould

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

202 pages; $16.95

"How cruel fate was, thought poor, learned Cornelius, with a pang of purest hate, as his weary feet carried him along life's dusty road." Those with an insatiable need for adjectives and enchantments will find a superabundance in this adult fairy tale, set in a time and land that never were. Lois Gould departs from the realism of her most celebrated work, Such Good Friends, to concoct the misadventures of a wandering astrologer-poet-artist. Cornelius arrives at the court of King Henry the Overwritten, his strange Queen Catherine, his older mistress Diane and the mandatory dwarf Morgantina. Lives are soon endangered, fortunes plundered, battles fought, all described in Gould's prose of regal purple. Gould piques occasional interest by giving the plot a series of unpredictable twists. She attempts to add further intrigue by cryptically warning that the book's ending is "subject to change." Then again, so are her followers.

SPENCE + LILA

by Bobbie Ann Mason

Harper & Row; 176 pages; $12.95

Here is a passage between elderly lovers, husband and wife: "The way she laughs is the moment he has been waiting for. She rares her head back and laughs steadily, her throat working and her eyes flashing. Her cough catches her finally and slows her down, but her face is dancing like pond water in the rain, all unsettled and stirring with aroused possibility." This is plain, strong writing, from a short novel that pulls the reader's emotions toward an honest center. The title characters once were youthful sweethearts. Now Spence is a tough old Kentucky soybean farmer, and Lila, his wife, is a sick woman who must have a breast removed. Their three children rally round, and the chapters follow their musings and their talk as they cope. The author, whose well-received earlier fiction includes the novel In Country and Shiloh and Other Stories, manages to avoid the gooey and patronizing muck that is usually described as heartwarming. Her account is funny and deft, with plenty of gristle.

RUSH TO NOWHERE

by Howard Lewis Russell

Donald I. Fine; 287 pages; $17.95

& First novels are typically wan and sensitive and tend to exhaust themselves long before the final page. But Rush to Nowhere vibrates with comic energy and sprightly malice, from its opening encounter with a subway lunatic to its climax at a rock star's demented funeral. If some of the awkward encounters with relatives back home in Alabama feel familiar, the loony indignities of office life seem wickedly fresh. The central joke is that every time something goes wrong for the engaging hero (like the author, a junior advertising executive in Manhattan) something else turns out better than ever. He romances a movie queen, wins at Atlantic City, scores big on a drug deal he had nothing to do with, even has a fling at screenwriting. Each mad twist of fate is in fact a logical extension of something else in a tightly symmetrical and yet airily giddy plot.

VANISHED

by Mary McGarry Morris

Viking; 246 pages; $16.95

"This is the true story," Mary McGarry Morris begins her first novel. "It starts once upon a summer day in Vermont." A half-naked Lorelei picks up a child-man who is working on roads for the county. The simpleton extends "his tarry hand." Immediately the voluptuous girl steals a pale blue pickup truck and waits for him on the soft shoulder of the highway. In a fast page, she has kidnaped a baby girl, and in what seems like five minutes after their first meeting, the three have driven into the Twilight Zone, only one as it might be seen through the lens of Walker Evans or told by a New England Tennessee Williams. Morris often seems more absorbed by the manipulation of language, cadence and humor than by the dreadful case at hand. Like a backwoods balladeer, she moves quickly to the final playing out of a tragedy about people whose weird lives have been pushed to the limit by genes, cultural circumstance and a witch's spell cast by the devastating author.