What Makes Siam Run

SIAM MIAMI by Morris Renek. 448 pages. Macmillan. $6.95.

It is a cliche of U.S. fiction that the lust for power, fame and money destroys the integrity of anyone scrambling to the top, especially in the entertainment world. The heroine of Morris Renek's strong second novel seems, at first glance, to be formfitted to the cliche. Sexy, bright and beautiful, she is determined to make it big as a popular singer any way she can. She succeeds. What is more extraordinary, so does Renek, somehow using a sentimental and unpromising plot to explore the nature of power, the exploitation of sex and some of the redeeming qualities of the human spirit.

An uninhibited Midwesterner from a solid middle-class family, the girl chooses her professional name, Siam Miami, for its exotic, Oriental and slightly Jewish flavor. But she cannot choose the track she runs on or the sordid crew of middlemen and managers who exploit her. Chief among them is Stewart Dodge, who has 50% of Siam's contract. He also has had her body, and is bent on taking over her soul. In an odd struggle, he almost destroys his singer and nearly ruins his own empire in order to revenge himself upon the one thing he lacks the power to corrupt --the girl's inner integrity.

What makes Siam Miami run is a compulsive need for some sort of great personal achievement--despite the odds against her in a field that is far from fastidious. Neither dumb enough nor callous enough to be a mere commodity, she is nevertheless badly equipped to deal with that old dilemma--how to sell yourself and save yourself at the same time. Sex equals money equals power seems to be a simple enough show-business equation. But even in this crocodile world, as Renek shows, personal feelings and gestures intruding at the wrong time suddenly shift the balance of power--a smile of appreciation at an inopportune stage of contract negotiations, or the loss of aggressive edge through private preoccupation, can be a minor disaster. In show business, Siam's psychiatrist suggests, the cost of success to the aspiring individual is protective deformity. "These men and women," says the doctor, "have derangements that successfully fit them for their occupations. Cure an executive and you lower his income. Their mink-lined psychosis is one of the country's sacred mental illnesses because it helps keep the status quo."

Eventually, Siam succeeds in denying the analyst's hypothesis by not becoming deformed, and her courage makes her a memorable heroine. Unflinchingly viewing the psychology behind the glamor industry's power plays without seeming to drown in the uglier aspects of human behavior, interlacing his pathos with satiric toughness, Author Renek proves that you can write a nuanced novel in the harsh shadow cast by formularized fiction.

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