Vitamin Pills

All through the summer, fiction sales have been in a slump. Most of the books at the top of the bestseller lists (The Cardinal, The Wall, Star Money, Jubilee Trail) have perched there for months, not because they are great novels but because the competition has not been good enough to dislodge them. The term bestseller itself became almost a misnomer. "Bestseller sales," complains the Retail Bookseller, "are down to depression levels." What is needed, says Bookseller, is "vitamin pills."

This week, booksellers had three name-brand pills that have always been sure-fire remedies. One of them runs to tried formula; the other two switch ingredients with resulting loss in potency.

Floodtide (Dial; $3) is Frank Yerby's mixture as before, a crude, shrewd combination of sex, violence, sadism, costuming and cliche. Yerby, a 33-year-old Negro writer who hit a $250,000 jackpot with his first novel, The Foxes of Harrow, knows just what his customers like and gives it to them in heroic doses: Hero Ross Pary isn't quality in his home town of Natchez, Miss., but he returns there in 1850 with an Oxford education, a face "as clean-cut as a medallion," eyes "somber and brooding" and "plaid trousers, clinging to his well-turned legs." Morgan Brittany, a rich planter's wife, sees him and feels "warm all over--warm and good." Ross makes other women feel good too, and much of Floodtide seems designed to set female readers dreaming of Ross and of how much better they could handle him than the women who try.

Given Glen (Houghton Mifflin; $3-75) is a massive and hard-to-swallow pill by that usually deft practitioner of slickmagazine fiction, Ben Ames Williams. For 629 pages, it rambles pointlessly on about Owen Glen's childhood in the 'gos, the daily minutiae of a mining town with its labor troubles and civic problems, endless excerpts from its banal little newspaper. Novelist Williams, who has done considerably better in his day (Come Spring) and has almost never descended to boredom, seems almost determined to write a boring story. His success is complete.

The Spanish Gardener (Little, Brown; $3) comes from the medicine chest of a real M.D., British-born A. (for Archibald) J. (for Joseph) Cronin. Dr. Cronin's compound is easier to swallow only because it is smaller. The story deals with the U.S. consul in a Spanish town, a vain, possessive introvert who stands between his frail young son and a normal boyhood. When the boy becomes fond of their kindly young gardener, the jealous consul breaks up their innocent friendship by a device that leads to the gardener's death. Dr. Cronin writes better than Novelists Yerby and Williams, but this is a minor effort, contrived and held together with unnaturally stilted dialogue.

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