Summer Reading

By Stefan Kanfer

Peter Benchley's 1974 best seller, Jaws, starred the shark that ate Long Island, became a smashing film and inspired a school of sequels. After some dry runs, the novelist has taken the plunge again. Beast (Random House; 350 pages; $21) features tentacles rather than mandibles. Otherwise it is the familiar mixture: lethal creature, relentless pursuers and vast quantities of saline solution. When waters off Bermuda become the killing grounds of a giant squid, tourism collapses. Whereupon an Ahabian fisherman, Whip Darling, clambers into a submarine and leads the hunt. All the old ingredients are present, from aqua horror ("the creature moved toward the unnatural thing") to Moby Dick denouement (" 'Here!' he shouted, and he drove the saw deep into the yawning beak"). In between are adrenal confrontations and detailed descriptions of marine life and death -- everything, in fact, but background music and special effects. Wait till next year.

The insinuations of Kitty Kelley satisfied some readers and repelled others. A third group could not get enough backstairs gossip, and its members are the target audience for A House of Secrets (Birch Lane; 237 pages; $18.95). The novel has two things to recommend it: a plausible first-person tone of wounded innocence, and an author named Patti Davis -- better known as the daughter of Nancy D. Reagan. The narrator is one Carla Lawton, who grows up in California with few friends and one opponent: her mother. Rachel Lawton lies compulsively and attempts to control every aspect of her child's life. She makes toilet training a battleground, then becomes an increasingly jealous and violent competitor as Carla matures sexually. Democrats eager for political revelations will be disappointed. Throughout the misadventures, Daddy, a bicoastal businessman, is malleable and remote as he floats through years of Teflon fatherhood.

Elmore Leonard controls more assets than a Mafia don. He possesses a gift for lowlife dialogue, a thorough knowledge of underworld mores and a mastery of high-tension narrative. What he does not have is a gift for whimsy, and that, alas, is the chief ingredient of Maximum Bob (Delacorte; 295 pages; $20). The title character is a sleazoid Florida judge who likes to hit on lady cops and hand out heavy sentences. Someone tries to ice Maximum Bob with a unique weapon: a hungry alligator. There is a long enemies list, including Leanne, the judge's loony wife; Dale Crowe, the latest victim of his warped justice; Dale's murderous uncle Elvin; and Dr. Tommy Vasco, a former dermatologist with a skinful of booze and drugs. Maximum Bob's survival depends on Kathy Baker, an attractive young probation officer. She and the rest of the cast provide a few entertaining moments for diehard fans. All others should wait until Leonard takes early retirement from the police farce.

The President, the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, an Australian doctor, an idealistic revolutionary, a dazzling lady leftist whose eyes show "a vulnerability that she took such pains to conceal . . ." Len Deighton is at it again, this time in the treacherous jungles of South America. Throughout MAMista (HarperCollins; 410 pages; $21.95), guerrillas attempt to seize control of Spanish Guiana, currently under the thumb of cryptofascist goons. The covert war is rife with betrayal, and ultimately no one is pure in Deighton's 17th spy novel. Intrigues misfire; disease kills more effectively than bullets; and corruption becomes the order of the day. Even so, the characters are shrewdly delineated, and the suspense continues until the final paragraph. Moral ambiguity used to be called Greeneland. Since Graham Greene's death, that territory is open for conquest. At least a part of it ought to be renamed Deightonsville.

When the body of Carla Tate washes up a few miles south of Santa Barbara, $ the flashbacks unreel in A Hollywood Life (Simon & Schuster; 320 pages; $19.95). The movie star, nee Karen Teitel, makes her screen debut in infancy, moves on to kiddie westerns and eventually becomes a major cinema celebrity. En route she passes through every Hollywood vicissitude and fashion, from child abuse to blacklisting to Vietnam protests to exercise tapes. She also manages to collect a series of husbands and lovers, most notably movie executive Jack Markel, who has all the Hollywood requisites: he is 30 years older, married, with strong ties to the Mob. David Freeman's pop tragedy contains snippets of biographical detail from the lives of Elizabeth Taylor, Shirley Temple, Jane Fonda and Natalie Wood. You've read the movies. Now see the book.

Back east, show business is more perilous for producers than for performers. Ben Riller is an impresario with a string of hits behind him and catastrophe in sight: he wants to produce a play in verse. (There actually was a rhyming comedy on Broadway this season, La Bete, and it bombed.) Short on cash, Ben borrows from Nick Manucci, a colorful old mafioso who wants 10% interest weekly, plus 50% of the show. As events hurtle toward opening night, agitations grow and Ben becomes more and more indecisive until, like Hamlet, he begins having conversations with his late father. Fortunately, they are witty exchanges by two convincing characters. Then again, in The Best Revenge (Random House; 240 pages; $20) everyone is convincing. Along with Tennessee Williams, novelist Sol Stein was a member of the Playwrights Unit at the Actors Studio. His portrait of backstage back stabbing is as uncomfortable as it is amusing, but Stein obviously knows what he is writhing about.

Playing the devil's advocate is Father Andrew M. Greeley's favorite avocation. His novels continually irritate the church he serves, by revealing Vatican politics and presenting flawed priests. The narrator of An Occasion of Sin (Putnam; 352 pages; $19.95) puts forth the most imperfect of them all. The scurrilous, irritable Father Lar McAuliffe is assigned to test the claims of sainthood for his late detested colleague, John Cardinal McGlynn, martyred in Nicaragua. Father Lar rubs his hands in anticipation -- he knows all about the Cardinal's mistress, his alcoholism and his rumored misuse of church funds. But as the priest pokes through the debris of a dead man's life, he finds that His Eminence performed many hidden acts of bravery and altruism. Is he worthy of canonization? Or does the past throw too long a shadow? Can it be that Greeley is knowledgeable and skilled enough to make the reader care? Saints preserve us.

When his wealthy Italian mistress dies, the amoral historian Max Mather inherits first choice from among her trove of paintings. Rummaging around, he finds two panels of aged wood. On them are portraits that have never been cataloged, both by Raphael, and each is worth in excess of $50 million. The Italian government may seize such rare items as national treasures, so Max works a scheme to spirit them out of the country. But this is only the beginning of Masterclass (St. Martin's Press; 330 pages; $19.95). Author Morris West (The Shoes of the Fisherman, The Clowns of God) fills his palette with informed descriptions of the cutthroat gallery world and furnishes his novel with subplots concerning financial shenanigans in Zurich, the ski slopes of St.-Moritz and a murder in Manhattan. West, a longtime connoisseur, knows about the art of the deal and the dealing of the art.

A novel that stops on page 36 for a brief treatise on tea is obviously not in a hurry. Neither are the protagonists of Bronze Mirror (Henry Holt; 337 pages; $19.95). The Yellow Emperor, who "discovered the wheel and the compass and such," the Silkweb Empress, responsible for "the delicate art of silkworm rearing," and their courtiers all flourish during the Song dynasty, circa 1135. Another invention is announced: the Emperor's minister has developed a set of symbols called writing. Now every royal tale can be recorded. The aristocrats begin a leisurely contest for the title of best storyteller, and during the competition every conceivable subject arises, from sexual conquest to miracles, from poetry to war. Jeanne Larsen, who previously conjured up the floating vistas of medieval China in Silk Road (1989), returns to her theme without repeating herself; this is the summer's most audacious entertainment.

Imperials are not the only ones to offer beguiling short stories this season. The long-neglected art of yarn spinning is robust again, in three fine collections. Joan Chase's Bonneville Blue (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 226 pages; $16.95) contains 11 poignant tales. In one of the finest, Elderberries and Souls, the adolescent narrator recalls a passionate crush on her stepuncle: "I was smelling his cotton shirt, smoke and starch, and his soul, as if that, too, were a thing to be smelled." But a sudden glimpse of his unstable temper makes her realize how inexperienced she is in the ways of the world and propels her into the arms of a simpler, safer and younger admirer. The sense of yearning fills and illuminates almost all the other stories, of small-town Madame Bovaries with insensitive husbands, of divorces who can be simultaneously tough-minded and bewildered: "I left my husband. Nearly six months ago, but I still can't believe it. I keep thinking I'll wake up."

Roxana Robinson is a fly on the wall in the world of the Wasp. The people in her stories are inheritors of urbanity and indulgences. They belong to garden and bridge clubs; they have exceptional houses, servants, luxuries -- and woes. A Glimpse of Scarlet (HarperCollins; 200 pages; $18.95) watches a divorced mother betrayed by her son's prep school roommate; a man's failing eyesight turn into a "treason of the body"; wavering between wife and mistress, a publishing executive experiences moral vertigo in his ordered world; a wife holds her husband up to public ridicule, only to have things turn around as soon as they are alone in the bedroom. Once people like these were the focus of Henry James and Edith Wharton; in recent years Louis Auchincloss and John Cheever have been their chroniclers. Robinson shows a similar mastery of subject and form, and she belongs in that august company.

"Your brain can get out of hand," says one character in Typical (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 207 pages; $19). Another figures that "character is nothing but warts." Judging from these 23 fictions, both statements are correct. Padgett Powell's two previous books, both novels (Edisto, A Woman Named Drown), exhibited a unique gift for regional American comedy. This sparkling collection reduces his scope without limiting his style. Dr. Ordinary is anything but: "He found God with no difficulty, but locating his belief another matter." Miss Resignation "liked football and was absolutely certain that she could have been an excellent off-tackle, slant-type runner . . . 44 was her number. Forty-four was her bra size, too. This had held her back in life, she felt." Occasionally the other characters in these fragments become a little too wacko, as if they were acting out for the onlookers. But Powell has a unique and vigorous imagination, and his eccentricity, studied or spontaneous, is to be treasured and closely watched.