Bookends

FAMILY: THE TIES THAT BIND . . . AND GAG! by Erma Bombeck

McGraw-Hill; 199 pages; $15.95

In the '60s, during the geologic age called Early Subdivision, a distracted housewife and sometime journalist named Erma Bombeck discovered what to do with two-week-old tuna casserole: turn the stuff into a howl of a newspaper column. Prepare three times a week; serves 31 million in 900 papers, at latest count. In this eighth book, an amiable reworking of her familiar material, Bombeck is still distracted like a fox and still being funny about her layabout kids and the alien life forms that glow in the back of refrigerators.

If she were accurately reporting the changes in her own life, she would admit that she no longer has to count the crumbs in cracker-box suburbia. If state-fair-quality dust balls grow anywhere in her snazzy Arizona rancho, it is in the box with those twelve honorary doctorates. Maybe she could do a column on rising to accept her appointment to the President's Advisory Committee for Women, only to feel the elastic turn coward and head south in her . . . nah. Bombeck knows what she is doing, and she honors the passage of time by retelling beloved old knee slappers. Her son, now grown, comes home for a visit, throws the door open, and just the way he used to 15 years ago, looks her in the eye and asks, "Anyone home?" Her adult kids still lock themselves in the bathroom till the dishes are done. Leftovers? Sure, but we roar for more.

PLAYMAKER

by Thomas Keneally

Simon & Schuster; 353 pages; $18.95

The notion of a drama inside a drama, set in an institution and authenticated by history, provided Marat/Sade with its power. Some 20 years later, Australian Novelist Thomas Keneally (Schindler's List) attempts the same tour de force with a fictive account of an incident in 1789, when his native land was a penal colony. There, a troupe of convicts acted in George Farquhar's comedy The Recruiting Officer, under the supervision of their frowning keepers. The opportunities for irony are omnipresent: male and female prisoners, known as lags and she-lags, are liberated into their parts, while ! guards are locked inside their roles as soldiers. Under the Southern Cross an upright commanding officer, tempted by a she-lag, consults a chaplain on the validity of marriage vows made in another hemisphere. Perhaps the greatest irony is the novel's skimpiness. The cast of characters is rollicking, and the plots are properly tangled. But little is fleshed out, and the actors onstage seem less artificial than the occurrences that take place outside the makeshift theater. In Keneally's retelling, the play within the play's the thing.

NOT WITHOUT MY DAUGHTER

by Betty Mahmoody with William Hoffer

St. Martin's Press; 420 pages; $19.95

In August 1984, Michigan Housewife Betty Mahmoody took a two-week trip to Tehran with her Iranian-born husband "Moody" and their daughter Mahtob. Once in his homeland, the osteopath decided to remain, hoping to boost his sagging career. Islamic law required his wife and daughter to obey him, and Moody enforced it by holding them hostage in his sister's house. For 18 months Mahmoody endured captivity, whose travails ranged from lack of Saran Wrap to beatings from her husband, all the while plotting her escape with Mahtob. The pair's 500-mile dash over treacherous mountains into Turkey makes for chilling reading. If Mahmoody's tale echoes another American's flight from the Middle East, it is no coincidence: Co-Author Hoffer also helped write the 1977 escape story Midnight Express.

MYRNA LOY: BEING AND BECOMING

by James Kotsilibas-Davis and Myrna Loy

Knopf; 384 pages; $22.95

Though she derides run-of-the-mill Hollywood confessionals ("Oh, it makes me wild when I think about the rubbish that's printed!"), Myrna Loy follows custom and drops plenty of the requisite juicy names. Except that hers are a classier set. Who else did "Jack" Barrymore call in the middle of the night with the greeting "This is the ham what am"? Well, probably a whole lot of women. But who else was President Roosevelt's favorite actress? On the set of After the Thin Man, Newcomer Jimmy Stewart ran around exclaiming "I'm going to marry Myrna Loy!" It was at her piano that Jerome Kern played The Last Time I Saw Paris, after the Nazi Occupation. And Lyndon Johnson sent her one of the pens with which he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Loy made 124 films in 60 years and survived to tell about it with charm and graceful understatement. She wants to be remembered, she says, "as sexy and witty and soignee." Exactly.