Summer Reading

Fiction and history to beguile vacation hours

PRIZE STORIES: THE O. HENRY AWARDS 1983 Edited by William Abrahams Doubleday; 344 pages; $16.95

Introducing this collection of 20 exemplary tales, culled from slick magazines and small literary journals, Editor William Abrahams notes: "However little attention they overtly pay to the public life of our time, these stories reflect in a more truthful way, at however indirect an angle of vision, the realities of contemporary life as most of us know it."

These mundane realities include the litany of woes that visit the unemployed in W.D. Wetherell's If a Woodchuck Could Chuck Wood: "The rags stuffed against drafts. The doctor's bills. The gas. The bare tires. The lottery tickets. The part-time jobs. The patches. The cutting back. The cold. The stove. The wood. The goddamn wood." John Updike's The City follows Computer Salesman Bob Carson's readjustment after an appendectomy: he was "trying to take again into himself the miracle of the world, programming himself." The aged farmer of William F. Van Wert's poetic Putting & Gardening discovers peace without change. On a Florida golf course his son observes him "on hands and knees, lovingly replacing my divot on . . . the only garden that is left for him." Like most of the ten women writers represented, Leigh Buchanan Bienen examines the everyday. Middle-class marriage is the subject, and only her narrator is exotic in My Life As a West African Gray Parrot.

Raymond Carver's A Small, Good Thing is precisely that: the progress of a couple recovering from the death of their son, rediscovering the savor of life at a bakery: "They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light . . . and they did not think of leaving." Carver's tale is distinguished not only for its deceptively simple, ultimately haunting style, but for its history. The original version was published in a collection of stories two years ago. Carver might have let it languish there; instead he chose to rework the material, enriching and enlivening it in the process. For years, obituaries have been written for the American short story; Carver's patient craftsmanship shows how vital the genre remains.

THE WARLORD by Malcolm Bosse Simon & Schuster; 717 pages; $17.95

The year: 1927. The place: prerevolutionary China. The situation: chaotic. Bandits and generals, distinguishable in some cases only by their uniforms, are battling for control of the country. Foreign opportunists skirmish for treasure. And China's peasants, as always, work, sweat and starve. Malcolm Bosse's novel re-creates the epoch and peoples it with an indelible cast, including a rising warlord named Chiang Kai-shek and a budding revolutionary called Mao Tse-tung.

But Bosse's best characters are fictive. Philip Embree, a missionary fresh out of Yale Divinity School, tries to escape his past by joining up with a gang of bandits. Vera Rogacheva, a beautiful White Russian, attempts to escape her future by surviving with the help of sex and guile. Tang, a Chinese general, still observes the ancient code of honor in a world where that concept has little place. As richly textured as a tapestry, The Warlord captures both the essence of Asia and the sweeping panorama of a people trapped between the ancient grinding forces of hollow tradition and heartless change.

THE TENNIS HANDSOME by Barry Hannah Knopf; 166 pages; $11.95

Readers who follow the work of Author Barry Hannah may feel a touch of dej`a vu upon beginning his fifth book. The Tennis Handsome opens with two pieces from Airships (1978), Hannah's highly praised collection of short stories. The first, Return to Return, retells the gothic catastrophe of French Edward, a good-looking tennis pro who discovers his mother in bed with his supposedly homosexual coach, nearly drowns in the Mississippi River and is fished out with most of his mental capacities washed away. He lives on as an automaton who is still a terror on the courts. The second reprised story, Midnight and I'm Not Famous Yet, deals chiefly with Captain Bob Smith of the U.S. Army and the crisis he undergoes during the war in Viet Nam.

The heroes of these tales have one thing in common: both come from Vicksburg, Miss. So does Hubert ("Baby") Levaster, a doctor hooked on booze, drugs and depravity, who packs a .410 shotgun pistol (its shells stuffed with popcorn) and steers the brain-damaged French Edward around the pro tennis tour. "Levaster banged him a hard blow against the heart. He saw French come alive and turn a happy regard to the court." What happens when these three characters mix, along with their assorted relatives, friends and lovers, is deliberately unbelievable; in extending two stories into a sketchy novel, Hannah creates a sequel as sideshow. The true star is Hannah's protean comic prose. He can deadpan with the best of them. Says Bob Smith, explaining why he has stolen a dead friend's extensive collection of books: "I never had an education except school." Even closer to Hannah's talent is rhetorical display. A description of Levaster: "He was wretched-looking; around him was a sodden shirt printed with unlikely blazing flora. It made you think of the flag of a tropical nation that had long since collapsed from bad taste."

To charge $ 11.95 for a little more than 100 pages of new material seems, on the face of it, outrageous. Yet Hannah's weird, obsessed intensity justifies the extravagance.

FATAL OBSESSION by Stephen Greenleaf Dial; 250 pages; $14.95

A popular T shirt among the town's teen-agers proclaims: HAPPINESS is CHALDEA IN YOUR REAR-VIEW MIRROR. Even 30 years ago, youngsters did their best to escape the Midwestern farming community as soon as they graduated from high school. John Marshall Tanner, fiftyish, was no exception. Returning now for the first time, the former football hero finds the town of Chaldea little changed: as ever, skulduggery, greed and hypocrisy thrive.

Tanner, a lawyer turned private investigator in San Francisco, has come back home to settle the future of the family farm with his nonfarming siblings. The 320-acre spread is coveted by a clutch of corporations, and the family is divided on whether to sell. The only kinsman making real money from the acreage is Tanner's nephew Billy, raising bumper crops of marijuana on the back 40. An embittered Viet Nam veteran and victim of dioxin burns, Billy has succeeded in exposing several of Chaldea's leading villains. When he is found hanging from a tree, town and family are only too happy to accept the official verdict of suicide. Tanner is convinced his nephew was murdered.

Before settling the case and putting Chaldea in the rear-view mirror once more, the doughty private investigator rediscovers an old love, uncovers some long-suppressed secrets, and puts Billy's pregnant lady on the road to social security. Things occur without apparent order but with the haphazard blur of ripening crops and turning leaves, as Midwest-raised Author Stephen Greenleaf knows they should. As for Investigator Tanner, in his fourth fictional appearance, he is once again the small-town boy making good, and better, and better.

THE LIGHT OF THE HOME by Harvey Green Pantheon; 205 pages; $18.95

In America's Victorian homes, even the furniture functioned to keep sensual passion at bay. "Celebrated physicians have condemned the double bed," warned a crusader for moral and physical hygiene in the 1890s. "The air which surrounds the body under the bed clothing is exceedingly impure, being impregnated with the poisonous substances which have escaped through the pores of the skin." Similarly, parlor chairs were designed to keep the sexes separate and unequal. The gentlemen's chairs were "akin to thrones," according to this diverting account of everyday life in the Victorian era. While men sat back comfortably in their high-backed chairs equipped with arm rests, women were confined to smaller, armless models that encouraged the proper posture: upright, away from the chair back, hands modestly folded on the lap.

Delightfully illustrated with pictures of artifacts from the Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum in Rochester, The Light of the Home illuminates the deadening burden that male supremacy imposed during the 19th century. Throughout Historian Harvey Green's lively text, advertisements, advice columns, how-to manuals and diaries kept by women of the period attest to an oppressed existence, all too often foreshortened by death from childbirth. Small wonder that Victorian women ingested vast quantities of alcohol and opium patent medicines. Inveighing against these tranquilizers of the age, one physician declared, "Their manufacturers are deserving of a place in the deepest part of the bottomless pit." His foresight is an astonishment; Green's hindsight is an education.

WESTERING MAN by Bil Gilbert Atheneum; 339 pages; $17.95

He was the first sheriff of Independence, Mo., the first white man to lead a party to the brink of the Yosemite Valley and the first to lead a wagon train into California, in 1843. Frontiersman Joseph Walker, says Biographer Bil Gilbert, "should have become a gaudy boon to the toy and TV industries" like his contemporary, Kit Carson. The reason he did not: Walker's stubborn refusal to embroider his achievements for legend-hungry Eastern journalists. So they "moved on to men and events that could be conventionally romanticized."

Prudent, fair-minded and humane, Walker roamed the West for 50 years, often living with Indians because, he said, "white people are too damned mean." Although the frontier echoed with violence, Walker favored adventure over fighting. Nearing his 50th birthday, he rode 800 miles from Santa Fe to Fort Leavenworth in an astonishing 23 days. The amateur naturalist was even interested in prairie dogs. On all fours he tried to capture one alive to obtain a study skin. A happy combination of luck, skill and attitude helped Walker to prevail over the wilderness; he died a proud and prosperous rancher in 1876 at the age of 77. Westering Man offers an unfamiliar frontier landscape. Here, the Indians are con men, whisky distilling is a regional pastime, and meteorites terrify intrepid explorers. The mood is antic, but the True West is not always the most appealing of places. Still, Joseph Walker is its true exemplar, and Bil Gilbert is its true celebrator. Those in search of myth should try Louis L'Amour or Zane Grey.

THE VON BUeLOW AFFAIR by William Wright Delacorte; 372 pages; $16.95

It was a case that had everything: European aristocracy and American money, a Newport palace and a fiercely loyal servant, a philandering stepfather and vengeful children, a blond heiress wife and a brunette TV-star mistress.

The trial of Claus von Buelow for the attempted killing of his wife Sunny transformed family griefs into a Roman circus, and Journalist William Wright adopts a barker's tone in his recollection of the slack, tedious life of the idle rich. (Sunny rose at 11, rarely left the house except to go shopping, and employed eleven gardeners to manicure eleven acres.) He deftly records the countless lies and petty sins of the accused murderer, starting with the facts that Claus was neither a von nor a Buelow (his father, Svend Borberg, was a convicted if not especially culpable collaborator with the Nazis in Denmark).

Wright wittily eviscerates the adolescents and haughty matrons who defended Claus (Character Witness Ann Brown, one of Rhode Island's grandest dames, addressed a lawyer "in a tone surely known to every butler in Newport"). But for all its malicious detail, The Von Buelow Affair never really answers the question that nags at every reader: Did Claus really do it? Wright plainly believes Von Buelow is guilty, and even Defense Attorney John Sheehan labeled the prosecution's case "overwhelming." But the examination of the clues is so clumsily marshaled that the reader is left to wonder whether Von Buelow could have been set up on evidence planted by his stepchildren or by Sunny's devoted maid Maria Schrallhammer. The case that had everything still needs a book that has everything--including a plausible solution to the crime.

NOBODY CARED FOR KATE by Gene Thompson Random House; 266 pages; $13.95

For Kate Mulvaney and the six repulsive family members who are her guests, a deluxe barge trip through the South of France is no Love Boat excursion. First Kate, the unloved one of the title, meets with foul play; then two of her relatives are killed. The squabbling survivors are effectively imprisoned on the barge while the investigation begins to unfold, and suspicions dart from person to person like fireflies on the canal.

As it happens, Kate had sniffed danger and summoned from San Francisco a lawyer she kept on retainer for occasions like this. By the time Attorney Dade Cooley, an urbane 60-year-old, and his astute wife Ellen reach the Toulouse-Carcassonne canal, Kate has just surfaced, as dead as Ophelia, in a lock. In a classic, Christie-precise scenario, Cooley discovers that the murders almost certainly involve Kate's obsessive desire to own a priceless 35-carat ruby, a relic of the Crusades, which was stolen and has been missing for several years.

Cooley, as unflappable as his name suggests, takes over the investigation with flak and authority. He receives admirable support from the one-eyed Inspector Marbeau of Castelnaudary, a Cyclops properly impressed to find that the San Franciscan knows la belle France like the back of his land. Author Gene Thompson also knows French history, terrain, customs and cuisine, and has created a series of suspects who are only too plausible. By the punch line, one wishes they could all have been guilty.

THE MARRAKESH ONE-TWO by Richard Grenier Houghton Mifflin; 346 pages; $14.95

Even by the standards of Hollywood, the Third World and the CIA (and they all apply), Burt Nelson has real problems. Burt, who narrates this stingingly funny picaresque, is in Morocco to write the script of an Arab-backed movie biography of Muhammad, a "couscous Western," as the director calls it. Along the way, Burt becomes entangled with the producer's secretary-mistress, a Palestinian terrorist, and is kidnaped by Moroccan radicals who rashly expect his employers to pay $1 million in ransom. Burt, however, not only knows his "onions on Islam," he is a part-time spook and a full-time survivor who proves devilishly resourceful.

So does Author Richard Grenier, a sometime scriptwriter and now film critic for Commentary. Grenier's best scenes vividly mix farce and mayhem, but they remain set pieces. He is less concerned with tightening the strands of his narrative than with slashing away at the twin hypocrisies of Celluloid City and oil country. From Libya to Egypt to Iran his film makers go, struggling to shore up their collapsing finances, and everywhere they encounter nothing but fanaticism, ignorance, treachery and greed. Readers interested in a balanced view of the Arab world should look elsewhere. If life is not fair, in the words of a recent President none too esteemed by Grenier's narrator, satire is even less so.

THE BRAND-X ANTHOLOGY OF POETRY THE BRAND-X ANTHOLOGY OF FICTION Edited by William Zaranka Applewood; $11.95 each

Parodies and caricatures, observed Aldous Huxley, are "the most penetrating of criticisms." These companion anthologies skewer English and American authors from Jonathan Swift (by Alexander Pope) to Raymond Chandler (by Woody Allen) with no tips on the foils.

Poets are treated even more harshly than writers of prose. Chaucer, for example, unintentionally parodies himself with the overwritten "The Cook's Tale." And the droning profundity of T.S. Eliot is sent up by Henry Reed: "As we get older, we do not get any younger/ Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five,/ And this time last year I was fifty-four,/ And this time next year I shall be sixty-two."

In Fiction John Updike lampoons Jack Kerouac: "Gogi Himmelman of the tattered old greenasgrass knickers . . . and the vastiest, most vortical, most insatiable eyes." But savagery is not a one-way street. Updike's Rabbit is roasted by Ian Duncan: "Big Chicken Henderson scoops and whittles at the space beneath his chin with a checkout-counter razor." After caricatures of versifiers like Shakespeare ("To be or not to be; that is the bare bodkin") and novelists like Jane Austen ("Are you not happy in Hertfordshire, Mr. Raskolnikov?"), Editor William Zaranka confesses, "The avowed purpose of both volumes is the same: to fool the sophomores." School's out, and the books are now free to entertain and bamboozle everyone else, in and out of the academy. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.