A Mushmeister Returns

By John Skow

If, a year or so ago, you were a gazelle-like, middle-aged, free-lance magazine journalist with corded forearms and an old pickup truck -- and quite a few of us and our trucks fit that description -- you had to wish that Robert James Waller had taken up a different hobby, ham radio or UFOs maybe, instead of writing itty-bitty novels. Because after The Bridges of Madison County hit the best-seller lists, with its weepy tale of 52-year-old photographer Robert Kincaid and fortyish Iowa farm wife Francesca Johnson meeting and spending four days in forbidden aerobics, then 25 years in noble renunciation, all privacy was gone. Lush-hipped, high-mileage beauties with roses in their teeth and not too much cellulite stared at you moist-eyed from behind self-service gas pumps and supermarket Chardonnay displays. You wondered if you should quickly do some push-ups in the men's room so those cords in your forearms would stand out better. These weathered, yearning women were so vulnerable, so trembling with hope . . .

"Listen, Buster," a close relative said during this difficult period, "nobody's staring at you, and when you suck in your gut like that, your eyes bug out." Not everyone understands sentiment. And as Waller wrote, "Where great passion leaves off and mawkishness begins, I'm not sure." He's still not sure, but he's headed there, leading a wagon train of believers. As of last week, Bridges had sold 4.1 million copies and had stayed on the best-seller lists for 63 weeks, 33 of those in first place. That's a lot of hankies. Steven Spielberg has bought movie rights, and Robert Redford is, as they say, being spoken of to play Kincaid.

And maybe Meryl Streep for Francesca, though the female lead doesn't really matter that much, since most of the powerful sighing in the story is done by Kincaid. But who will play Rationality, Kincaid's conscience? One vote here for Jack Nicholson, who wouldn't have any trouble with the pivotal scene in which "Rationality shrieked at him, 'Let it go, Kincaid, get back on the road. Shoot the bridges, go to India. Stop in Bangkok on the way and look up the silk merchant's daughter who knows every ecstatic secret the old ways can teach. Swim naked with her at dawn in jungle pools and listen to her scream as you turn her inside out at twilight. Let go of this' -- the voice was hissing now -- 'it's outrunning you.' But the slow street tango had begun."

It sure had. Waller, who's 54 and on sabbatical from his day job as a professor of management at Northern Iowa State University, just happened to tell somebody at Warner Books that, yeah, he had been a semipro, Saturday- night-at-the-Holiday-Inn sort of guitarist and singer since college. And, yeah, he had written a song about Kincaid and Francesca called The Madison County Waltz.

Publishers indulge the whims of authors who sell hard-cover books in the millions, and it wasn't a lot of trouble to get Atlantic Records to hire some studio musicians and produce a CD. Nothing in it will worry Garth Brooks or Willie Nelson, but Waller's thin voice isn't disgraceful. It is just ordinary and needs some shower-room tile to bulk it up. Somebody is kidding somebody else here: Does Waller realize that the CD is mediocre? If so, does he suppose his fans won't care? Is he simply -- and at any cost, even ridicule -- a humorless self-advertiser?

An ugly thought. But Waller seems to think he resembles his hero, and it's a point he makes repeatedly. "Intellectually and emotionally, and in terms of outlook, I'm 100% Robert Kincaid," he says in the CD notes. His new weensy novel, Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend (Warner; 197 pages; $16.95), offers another leathery, middle-aged wearer of faded jeans, Michael Tillman, who used to be a high school basketball hero, as Waller was, and, like the author, is now a professor of management at a small Iowa college. Tillman is effortlessly brilliant, a campus rebel and a flaming romantic. He meets Jellie Braden, the gorgeous wife of an undeserving fool. Waller writes, "But Michael Tillman wanted her. Wanted her more than his next breath, wanted her enough to travel the world looking for her." They rendezvous; they make love (atop Tillman's . motorcycle, or so Waller insists); she flees to India; he follows . .

This is boohoo literature, standard bodice-ripper mush, and the only interesting question in such cases is, How much is cynical calculation and how much does the author believe? The guess here is that at least some belief is required, or successful trash would be easier to manufacture. At any rate, Waller may have made a mistake in Waltz. The brilliant touch in Bridges was that the lovers parted. In the new tale they end up together, and one will surely turn out to squeeze the toothpaste from the top.