Bookends

FLASHMAN AND THE DRAGON

by George MacDonald Fraser

Knopf; 320 pages; $16.95

Harry Flashman, a flamboyant but minor villain in Thomas Hughes' 19th century novel Tom Brown's School Days, moved to center stage in George MacDonald Fraser's comic-historical novels of imperial adventure. Previous volumes placed Flashman, now a mature, hard-drinking rogue, in and around the Crimean War, the African slave trade and the American gold rush. With great panache he became involved with figures ranging from Bismarck and Abraham Lincoln to Queen Victoria and Lola Montez.

Flashman and the Dragon, eighth in the series of Flashman adventures and one of the saltiest, immerses him in the Taiping Rebellion, a nominally Christian uprising that lasted 14 years and resulted in some 20 million deaths. Based on a reputation for valor, acquired by stumbling into dangerous places at well-publicized times, the intrepid Flashman becomes Britain's semiofficial envoy to the revolutionaries. His escapades, both military and carnal, bring verve and wit to a carefully footnoted tale. Young Tom Brown was certainly more the gentleman, but he could not possibly have grown up to be so much fun.

DEADWOOD

by Pete Dexter

365 pages; Random House; $17.95

James Butler ("Wild Bill") Hickok was holding aces and eights when Jack McCall shot him point-blank during a poker game in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. The fatal date was Aug. 2, 1876. Hickok did not have a chance to draw for either a full house or his life. The bullet went in the left side of his head and came out through his right cheek, leaving a crosslike exit mark. Pete Dexter's novel is packed with grisly details (the severed head of an outlaw, the emergency treatment of gunshot wounds and syphilis), although not all agree with history. McCall was hanged for the killing, but in the Dexter version, the jury takes one hour to acquit the assassin, "on account of his mortal grudge against Wild Bill, and self-defense."

The makeshift court worked swiftly in Deadwood, presumably so that judge and jury could get back to gambling, drinking and whoring, the town's principal activities. Standing the myth of the American West on its head is % not a new trick. But this time out, Dexter performs it with unusual skill, grace and glee, particularly in his presentation of Calamity Jane. No act of violence or natural appetite passes without a graphic description. This is Blazing Saddles for grownups.

SARANAC

by Robert Taylor

Houghton Mifflin; 308 pages; $17.95

The subtitle, America's Magic Mountain, refers to Thomas Mann's novel of a sanatorium as microcosm. Fair enough; this lively history reflects a galaxy of medical and literary incidents. The cast is worth the entrance fee: W. Somerset Maugham and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walker Percy and Bela Bartok, and even Gerald and Sara Murphy, the '20s couple who decided that living well was the best revenge. They all had one thing in common: tuberculosis, and the refuge in upstate New York offered the promise of recovery. Sometimes it was illusory. Bartok flourished at Saranac but later succumbed to the disease; the Murphys' adolescent son died there shortly after working on an etching of his visitor, Ernest Hemingway. But many others returned to life on the outside, often as uneasily as Percy's protagonist in The Moviegoer, "no more able to be in the world than Banquo's ghost." Like the disease it fought, Saranac was eventually undone by antibiotics. But for some 70 years, it was a rare arena that managed to encompass the arts of healing and high drama. So does the book that bears its name.

SHALLOW GRAVES: TWO WOMEN AND VIETNAM by Wendy Wilder

Larsen and Tran Thi Nga

Random House; 291 pages; $16.95

Most of the prose poems in this memoir of Viet Nam amount to Polaroids hastily snapped before the mind forgets what it has witnessed: children rioting over candy at a Saigon orphanage; a bar girl singing to a G.I. ("You give me baby./ I give you V.D."). But as the authors pass out their pictures, they also provide moving autobiographies. Wendy Wilder Larsen reconstructs the early '70s from the American point of view; Tran Thi Nga offers a far more unusual perspective. The daughter of a Vietnamese mandarin, she twice became the second wife in polygamous marriages, first to a Chinese general, then to her sister's husband. She managed to escape to the south and later watched Saigon dissolve. "So many . . . left in shallow graves," she recalls from her new U.S. home, "souls wandering ceaselessly." It is a cry that echoes long after the close of her valedictory.