Bookends

GOLDWYN

by A. Scott Berg

Knopf; 579 pages; $24.95

His malapropisms -- calling the French painter "Toujours Lautrec," asking some fellow schemers to "include me out" of a deal -- gained Samuel Goldwyn a perverse fame as the archetypal Hollywood immigrant mogul, crude and semiliterate. But as A. Scott Berg demonstrates in this readable, richly researched biography, Goldwyn was never an archetypal anything, except in his poor Jewish origins in Eastern Europe. Unlike the Mayers and Warners, he made relatively few films, and he never built a mighty empire with a huge star roster and an immense distribution network. He was the ultimate independent producer, with a compulsive need for autonomy and control ("I made Wuthering Heights," he once said. "((William)) Wyler only directed it").

In Berg's account, Goldwyn's radical self-reliance had something like the nobility of a tragic flaw. His two marriages were deeply troubled, and as a father he was sometimes cruelly distant. What sustained and transformed his life were his simple, almost innocent, aspirations. His movies at their tasteful, well-crafted best (Dodsworth, The Westerner, The Best Years of Our Lives) had the kind of polished literacy the immigrant lad could not himself command but could command others to produce on his behalf.

WE ARE STILL MARRIED

by Garrison Keillor

Viking; 330 pages; $18.95

Garrison Keillor is still best known as the host, head minstrel and founding fabulist of public radio's weekly Prairie Home Companion, which went off the air almost two years ago. But the shock, for a radio fan leafing through this collection, is to discover, perhaps not for the first or fifth time, that his hero is even more gifted as writer than as entertainer. In a superb story called What Did We Do Wrong?, the first woman major-league baseball player hits .300 but slobbers tobacco juice, gives fans the finger and can't deal with the hot-breathed lunacy of a nation's love. In Meeting Famous People, a country-music star is hunted down and sued, then jailed and beaten after he $ refuses a fan's request for a handshake. In the title sketch, an ordinary couple become celebrities, in a way that seems chilling and entirely possible, when PEOPLE magazine, the morning babble shows and a congressional subcommittee hold their marriage up for universal inspection. If Kafka were writing this spooky stuff, you would call it Keilloresque, but it wouldn't be nearly so funny.

PLAYMATES

by Robert B. Parker

Putnam; 222 pages; $17.95

Somebody on the Taft University basketball team is shaving points, the rumor goes, and Spenser, the soft-centered hard-guy detective, soon discovers a grubbier scandal. Nobody at Taft will admit it, but the team's star power forward has been passed through his courses for nearly four years despite the fact that he can't read. Spenser is shocked -- he believes in truth, honor and grade-point averages -- and he sets out to discover which lizards, tenured and not, are responsible. The reader puts up his feet and gets comfortable. That's a bad sign. Too much comfort, too little doubt. In the early Spenser books, everyone was edgy. Now hero, victim and villains fit their roles a trifle too cozily. Is it time for Spenser to retire and teach poetry at Taft?

FEEDING THE RAT

by A. Alvarez

Atlantic Monthly Press

152 pages; $17.95

Mo Anthoine's rat, as he explains it to the author, is the absurdly contrary impulse that drives him to leave environments that are warm, horizontal and safe, and seek out predicaments that are cold, perilous and vertical. Anthoine is a top English Alpinist and Himalayan climber, and his rat has a huge appetite. A. Alvarez relates that Anthoine was with the legendary Doug Scott, on a 24,000-ft. mountain in the Karakoram range in Kashmir, when Scott broke both ankles and crawled toward camp for a week before his rescue. When superclimbers speak of this sort of epic, it is hard for weekend hikers to put it in perspective. Alvarez, an amateur climber, provides a useful bridge for the imagination by telling of two stiff climbs he did with his friend. He was stretched to the limit; Anthoine, of course, was untroubled. Flatlanders who read all this still will not understand why the rat gets hungry, but armchair mountaineers will dream of glory.