Summer Reading

By Stefan Kanfer

"A land of ice and ice cream and baseball and beach picnics and outdoor concerts, of freedom felt in the body itself." John Updike's celebration of a summer holiday omits one delight: reading John Updike. It can be experienced in the pages of Summer (Addison-Wesley; 252 pages; $35), a collection of seasonal bouquets by 37 writers including Mary Cantwell (To a City Breeze), Laurie Colwin (How to Avoid Grilling), Wallace Stevens (Sailing After Lunch) and Meg Wolitzer (The Summer Reading List). Herewith another summer reading list to beguile the hours spent in hammocks, grass and sand:

No small subjects for Arthur Hailey. Others may write about a double room or a 747; he takes on the entire Hotel and Airport. In his tenth novel, Hailey, 70, offers every sound bite of The Evening News (Doubleday; 564 pages; $21.95), plus executive-suite skirmishes between an anchorman and a correspondent, rivalries for beautiful and ambitious women, and a global sweep, from Vietnam to Peru -- with requisite stops in Washington, Los Angeles and New York. The characters are familiar, and the insights strictly keyhole. But Rather, Brokaw and Jennings could learn a lot about pace and timing from the old pro.

Kim Wozencraft is a former narcotics policewoman who got hooked on drugs and became an armed robber. In this fictive treatment, the protagonist is called Kristen Cates, but all resemblances to the author are strictly intentional. The upright Texas girl gets hooked in order to trap a dealer, backslides into the nightmare underworld of pushers and addicts, and finally surfaces in another kind of purgatory: jail. Rush (Random House; 260 pages; $18.95), Wozencraft's tale of temptation, fall and rehab, sometimes gropes for expression, as if the recollections were too painful for words. In every sense, this should make one hell of a film.

Since the coming of glasnost, the international spy novel is defunct. So goes the current wisdom, and it is as false as the leads in Soviet Sources (Atlantic Monthly Press; 264 pages; $19.95). Novelist Robert Cullen, a former Moscow correspondent for Newsweek, jolts the genre into new life with a plausible plot and authentic detail. Stationed in the U.S.S.R., journalist Colin Burke discovers that the nation's leading reformer has suffered a stroke. Hard-liners plan a takeover, and part of the plan is framing the American on trumped-up charges before he can spill his scoop. Meantime, a Soviet actress is also trying to go West. Cullen's chilling portrait of Soviet society in flux is an ideal antidote for 90 degrees weather.

Socially, John Sutter and Frank Bellarosa are poles apart. One is a well- born, wealthy lawyer; the other is the head of a New York crime family. But geographically the two men are close neighbors in a posh section of Long Island, N.Y., called The Gold Coast (Warner; 500 pages; $19.95). The fences come down when Sutter defends Bellarosa in a murder trial -- and when the don seduces Mrs. Sutter. Or is it the other way around? As Sutter wrestles with his instincts and his ethics, the notion of vendetta no longer seems the exclusive property of the Mafia. Nelson DeMille's previous books Word of Honor and The Charm School demonstrated an ability to sustain tension; this one adds a smart social eye and an unfailing sense of humor.

Another gold coast lies 3,000 miles away, in Orange County, Calif. Joseph Wambaugh makes it the backdrop for The Golden Orange (Morrow; 317 pages; $19.95), his tale of high rollers on the sunstruck expanses of Newport Beach. Former policeman Winnie Farlowe pilots a ferry and works at his favorite hobby, drinking. One day he slams his boat into a yacht. The accident introduces him to a much divorced lady with money, looks and a conniving mind. Before Winnie's head clears, he is being set up for a scam that involves betrayal and homicide. In The Blue Knight and The Choirboys, Wambaugh demonstrated a Panasonic ear for cop patois. In his latest work, the tension sometimes sags, but the dialogue lingers in the ear: "An unsolved murder is like . . . an insult to me personally, not jist to the corpse."

"Think of Clifton Webb at age 40," says Dominick Dunne, speaking of a gentleman bitch in his latest roman a clef, An Inconvenient Woman (Crown; 458 pages; $19.95). And why not? Everyone else in the novel seems to have stepped directly from a '40s feature: plutocrat Jules Mendelson; his socialite wife Pauline; his long-suffering mistress Flo March; and a sexually ambiguous friend, the late Hector Paradiso. Hector's violent death was marked as suicide, but Mendelson knows who shot him and why. The cover-up is reminiscent of an actual Los Angeles scandal; the malicious dialogue and the insider's knowledge of West Coast society are Dunne's alone. The mix is simultaneously off-putting and wickedly informative. Think of Rex Reed at age 60.

First came The Shoes of the Fisherman, then The Clowns of God. Lazarus (St. Martin's Press; 293 pages; $19.95) completes Morris West's papal trilogy. Few laymen have written so knowledgeably about Vatican politics. West charts the course of Leo XIV, a crusty soul who has alienated the liberals in his flock. Now the Pontiff must undergo bypass surgery, and as if that were not threat % enough, Muslim terrorists are offering $100,000 for his life. Pope Leo returns from the operation like Lazarus from the dead. But he is a changed man, with plans to alter his church for the better. It is then that the assassin moves in for the kill. No one but West would dare to mix irony, suspense and faith -- and get away with it.

Like many immigrants, the short story was born in Europe and flourishes across the Atlantic. Case in point: The Barnum Museum (Poseidon; 237 pages; $18.95). Although Steven Millhauser can tell a straightforward anecdote, his true strength is magic realism. In one tale a boy steps behind a movie screen to find rooms full of ectoplasmic actors coming to life for an audience of one; in another, a certain Mr. Porter runs into inclement weather and washes away like a watercolor in a rainstorm. Brilliant parodies, pastiches and comments on Alice in Wonderland, Sinbad and T.S. Eliot show how this gifted craftsman can stretch the boundaries of the form.

On the shore of Chesapeake Bay, watermen surreptitiously plan to get rid of a corpse before anyone can discover it. But a small boy has witnessed the killing, and he knows who pulled the trigger: his father. On the Western plains, a frightened woman leaves her husband and four young children. He tracks her down, and she relents as "her body starts flowing toward the baby." A man returns to the ranch where his mother has married a drunken old farmhand and finds she has done the right thing. In a Father's Place (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 214 pages; $18.95) is filled with such surprises, along with a profound sense of place, character and incident. Christopher Tilghman's first book announces one of the year's most significant debuts.

Alice Munro may be the one contemporary writer whose work bears comparison with Chekhov's, and she knows it. In Friend of My Youth (Knopf; 273 pages; $18.95), the Canadian author tells a story of burial at sea. She titles it Goodness and Mercy. Chekhov wrote on the same subject and called his tale Gusev. Is Munro's work a challenge or an homage? No matter; both stories are masterpieces of subtlety and cunning. Other tales investigate the vagaries of love, married and adulterous, and the mystery that separates the sexes. One woman's musings encapsulate the story collection: "A knot in his mind you might undo, a stillness in him you might jolt . . . Could it be said to make you happy? Meanwhile, what makes a man happy? It must be something quite different."

Ruth Rendell has enough talent for two people, so she also writes mysteries under the name of Barbara Vine. They usually concern a crime committed long ago; this time, Gallowglass (Harmony; 272 pages; $19.95) shifts from past to present, from first person to third, like sand in an hourglass. The kidnaping of an heiress was foiled years ago; now the same man tries to commit the same crime, this time with the aid of the naive narrator. An attempt is made to bribe the woman's bodyguard; when he refuses, the malefactors kidnap his young daughter with catastrophic results. As a plotter, Vine could study Rendell; as a student of psychology, she can give lessons to anyone.

In a formal mystery, when club members sit down of an evening, one of them will never rise again. The others will stand accused in the death by poisoning. The difference in Murder Times Two (Simon & Schuster; 284 pages; $17.95) is that the protagonist, retired attorney Reuben Frost, is one of the suspects. Together with his wife Cynthia and his friend Detective Luis Bautista, Frost searches for the real culprit. Their investigation leads to the boardrooms of his old firm, power lunches at Manhattan's toniest club, and the swimming pools of Rio. Haughton Murphy (the pseudonym of James Duffy, a retired Manhattan lawyer) writes with inside information and civilized wit. The fifth adventure of Mr. and Mrs. Frost makes them the most enjoyable pair of married sleuths since Mr. and Mrs. North.

John Bartholomew Tucker wins the prize for the year's best mystery title: He's Dead -- She's Dead: Details at Eleven (St. Martin's Press; 312 pages; $17.95). The puzzler that follows is just as piquant. Jim Sasser, onetime TV commentator and now a writer of thrillers, stops by the network to see an old Vietnam war buddy. He is not a happy camper. Cost cutting is under way, firings are the order of the day, and a terrorist is threatening to do some eliminating of his own. For a lark, Sasser decides to probe, just the way his fictional heroes do. Thereafter troubles and murders begin in earnest. Tucker wanders a bit, tells some good jokes and provides a smashing and surprising denouement, in a dirigible high over Giants Stadium during a Monday-night football game.

Susan Orleans is a free-lance journalist who works weekends, as evidenced by her lively nonfiction, Saturday Night (Knopf; 258 pages; $19.95). Ranging around the U.S., she watches people spend and squander their leisure hours. In Elkhart, Ind., folks drive slowly up and down Main Street. In Los Angeles airheads make the club scene. In Baltimore an octogenarian goes to her weekly polka dance; she has not missed one in nearly 30 years. A Manhattan socialite lends credence to the belief that the wrong people have money: "I'm always out in the country riding my horse and so forth on the weekends, and even if I weren't I can't imagine who would be around to invite for a Saturday party." Every now and then some adventurous soul might try the greatest diversion of them all: reading, just for the pleasure of it.