A STAR-SPANGLED SNOOZE

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Unlike Stephen King's blockbusters, the best sellers churned out by Tom Clancy always seem as though they are written for readers who would otherwise head for the beach with the newest edition of a Jane's defense manual nestled alongside their sunblock. Only in a Clancy opus are M1A2 battle tanks, F-16 planes and C-5B Galaxy transports sprinkled through the text more liberally than punctuation.

And yet despite these economical acronyms for the weaponry and technogadgetry with which he is so obsessed, Clancy cannot seem to turn in a novel that weighs less than a laptop. At 4 lbs. and 874 pages, his ninth, Executive Orders (Putnam; $27.95), is another doozy of laborious plot, bombastic jingoism and tedious detail. This time out, Clancy hero Jack Ryan, former CIA director, National Security Adviser, investment banker and maritime historian, gets the only job left to him that doesn't involve manning a cash register at Denny's: President of the United States.

You can rest assured that there is little time for lunching with Barbra Streisand. Ryan ascends to the top spot when a Japanese airplane plunges into the U.S. Capitol, killing the President, his Cabinet and most members of Congress. Jack's the only guy left, and before he can say middle-class tax cut he has to start battling united Iran-Iraq forces, right-wing militia, a new worldwide plague, terrorists and aggressive TV journalists. "I don't know what to do," he says to himself in a typically Clancyesque moment of self-reflection. "Where's the manual, the training course for this job?"

Not to worry. As always, the know-how is encoded in Ryan's dna. He works his magic against the evildoers and still finds the time to poke his head in on his sleeping children and muse that young Sally "now looked forward to the day she'd buy things from Victoria's Secret." Alas, with Ryan as her father she will probably wind up wearing camouflage-colored bras.

--By Ginia Bellafante