Bookends

IN HER OWN IMAGE by Anna Murdoch Morrow; 225 pages; $15.95

Cynics will claim that Anna Murdoch's first novel, which bears the dedication "For K.R.M.," was helped into print by the name hiding behind those initials. The fledgling author's husband happens to be Keith Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born press baron whose empire now includes a movie studio and may soon ex tend to a string of independent TV stations in the U.S. But the cynics in this case will be wrong. In Her Own Image would have found a willing publisher if it had been written by someone without an influential spouse to her name. It has most of what blockbusters require these days: sex from the female perspective, an unfulfilled mother and her itchy daughters, and a sympathetic weather system that delivers up heat waves and thunderstorms whenever the plot requires them.

It also has Australia, specifically a vast sheep farm near Canberra owned by Harry and Liz Barton. Liz's mother BB (short for Betty Beauchamp) lives on the place, growing more gaga and malevolent by the day. Worse, Younger Sister Josie arrives from New York City for a Christmas visit, along with her son Alex and her still smoldering passion for Liz's husband. Naturally, family feuds overshadow all those exotic wallabies, kangaroos and kookaburras. But not before Murdoch turns a few deft landscapes and some surprisingly sympathetic portraits of the men trapped in a female fantasy.

SECRETS by Danielle Steel Delacorte; 336 pages; $17.95

In the continuing saga of How the Book World Turns, Danielle Steel is queen of the immaculately coiffed romance. With 19 published novels (more than 55 million copies in print), she knows better than most that the majority of women readers want stories of endless love and eternal youth. Lately a touch of career and financial independence is not out of place. The three soap-opera actresses in Secrets manage to be both busy professionals and powerful love goddesses. The most impressive of the trio converts a homosexual into her lover and father of her child. The plot deals with how these women eventually pair off with three male colleagues. As in the soaps, beauty is not the only thing that is skin deep. Steel and/ or her editors are adept at turning banalities into pleasantries and serious problems like birth defects and murder into inconveniences. The obsession with good looks is total. Scarcely a page goes by without a reminder that the heroes are handsome and the heroines scrumptious. The effect is to raise physical perfection to a spiritual value. In the glitzy world of Secrets, the body is the condominium of the soul.

RICH KIDS by John Sedgwick Morrow; 329 pages; $17.95

The American dream involves hard work, success and amassing a pile. But the American daydream, John Sedgwick argues, is to be born to money and watch the trust-fund checks roll in. Sedgwick himself is a scion of New England aristocracy and a minor-league rich kid: he inherited $70,000, devalued by inflation and stock market woes. He was prompted to explore the sociology of gilded youth by reading Edie, the 1982 best seller about his cousin Edie Sedgwick, a socialite and Andy Warhol acolyte who died of a drug overdose. Some of the 57 heirs Sedgwick interviewed tell sad stories, and all but a few are burdened by guilt and a nagging self-doubt. Knowing what to want seems as hard for them as getting it is for their underprivileged peers. The book spends too much time on gossip and not enough on psychology, but it does provide incontrovertible proof that money cannot buy happiness. For those without inherited wealth, that is a consolation that will never go out of style.

THE CAT WHO WALKS THROUGH WALLS by Robert A. Heinlein Putnam; 382 pages; $17.95

Not many readers under 40 are strangers to Stranger in a Strange Land. That futuristic fantasy of a new messiah became a cult favorite in the '60s, and today there are more than 3 1/2 million copies in print. Now 78, Robert Heinlein has assumed the title of Grand Old Man of Science Fiction, but he is not content to rest on his reputation. The Cat Who Walks Through Walls shows that the master remains inventive and concerned. His hero, Dr. Richard Ames, learns that his new wife Gwen Novak has come from another dimension in space and time. Her mission: to destroy Mike, an all-powerful computer that lives in the future. There it prepares to turn Ames' world into a totalitarian nightmare. With the aid of almost as many characters as a phone book the pair attempt to parse the future tense. Will evil vanquish good? Will the romance blossom amid chaos and strife? Will this page turner find a new life on film or TV? Stay tuned.