Bookends

THE HEARTS AND LIVES OF MEN

by Fay Weldon

Viking; 357 pages; $18.95

For her twelfth novel, British Author and Playwright Fay Weldon has taken a giddy leap back to the fiction style of the 19th century. Enough of angst and ambiguity, of literary experiment. Bring on Trollope's nudging narrator and Dickens' moral confidence. The Hearts and Lives of Men -- surely a Victorian novelist would have come up with a livelier title -- is nonetheless set in modern times, specifically the fast-track London art world of the '60s and '70s. It covers 23 years in the lives of Clifford and Helen Wexford, an attractive, careless pair who marry, remarry, have messy affairs, manage to lose track of their little girl for a 14-year span -- and still retain the reader's sympathy. Perhaps because the author is a longtime feminist, Helen, who finally conquers her passive instincts and makes an independent life for herself, comes off rather better than her domineering, pigheaded husband.

But Weldon is more interested in cleverness than character. Her gabby narrator, a woman in the Wexfords' social circle, buckets along, throwing motivation and consistency to the winds in favor of little epigrams and bitchy asides ("She looked like a Christmas cracker with no present inside"). Weldon even produced this flighty nonsense the old-fashioned way: in weekly installments for the British magazine Woman. The Hearts and Lives of Men will make superior feminist beach reading.

THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY

by Edmund White

Knopf; 228 pages; $17.95

In his 1982 semimemoir, A Boy's Own Story, Edmund White came as close as anyone has to producing the Great American Gay Novel. Its depiction of sexual awakening was vividly specific, yet its emotional terrain -- initial delight leading to guilt and alarm at the strange new force in one's life -- might have evoked adolescence for almost any reader. The Beautiful Room Is Empty, a sequel that takes White into young manhood, is at once clumsier and much more ambitious. At times as pretentious as the title, derived from Kafka, it trots out a succession of irritatingly self-indulgent characters and a clutch of cliches about the 1950s, from the bohemian belle to the poet turned adman. Yet White can always save a wearying passage with some apercu about himself or some chillingly uninflected glimpse of cruelty. And if his protracted tale about coming out seems dated, that merely reflects White's master plan: he aims at nothing less than a social history of emerging gay consciousness from the suppressed 1950s through the '60s. In the era of AIDS, White's novel is a fiercely remembered plea not to push gays back into the closet.

NOTHING TO DECLARE

by Mary Morris

Houghton Mifflin; 250 pages; $18.95

A woman who travels alone, says Adventurer Mary Morris, "should know how to strike a proud pose, curse like a sailor, kick like a mule, and," she advises, "you mustn't be a fool." Especially when your roads lead way off the beaten track. Morris is not one for a luxury cruise. Instead she opts for danger and discomfort. Nothing to Declare is a memoir of her travels in Central America, which she explores in the tradition of truth through squalor, using a Mexican slum as a base camp. Despite occasional lapses into over- studied eloquence, she is a fascinating guide, with an eye for the brutal, the garish, the silly and bizarre. At a Mayan market in the Yucatan, Morris is tempted by giant beetles being sold as pets. "They were dressed as cowboys with small hats, boots on their legs, soldiers in camouflage, and women of the night, with long eyelashes and pink satiny skirts . . . I had no idea what I'd do with a pet beetle in my travels, so I resisted and kept going." The energy of her motion carries the reader with her.

BINSTEAD'S SAFARI

by Rachel Ingalls

Simon & Schuster; 224 pages; $15.95

Anthropologist Stan Binstead is en route from New England to the African bush to search for a lion-worshiping cult. In London a friend dismisses the sect as "just an old-fashioned protection racket." Stan insists it could be the start of a new religion. Ordinarily, the safari would also enable Stan to indulge his favorite pastime, philandering, but his drab wife Millie insists on coming along. In Rachel Ingalls' tale of transformations, the ill-used wife falls in love with a dashing game warden who is believed to possess the qualities of the lion he once killed in a tribal rite. The affair works its magic, and Millie blossoms, while Stan falters in his search. The warden is killed by poachers, but then a beautiful lion begins haunting the safari camp. The plot takes incredible turns, but Fabulist Ingalls (Mrs. Caliban), an American who has lived in London for 24 years, glides, with sly humor, into the fantastic so deftly that she makes events seem not only plausible but inevitable.