Summer Reading

Raconteurs and romancers lighten leisure hours

". . . AND LADIES OF THE CLUB" by Helen Hooven Santmyer Putnam; 1,176 pages; $19.95

The happy tale of Helen Hooven Sant myer is the stuff of literary myth. Her first two novels were ignored in the 1920s. But the lady never lost heart. She planned a stirring rebuttal to Sinclair Lewis' scabrous attacks on Middle America, ". . .

And Ladies of the Club. " Now, some 50 years later, her overweight saga has been published to enormous fanfare. Only one aspect of this heartwarming tale falters: Ladies itself. Through innumerable crises, illegitimate children, laudanum addiction, lesbianism and suicide, the many heroines remain mere mouthpieces. They speak of sex as "that horrid business."

Best Friends and Club Founders Anne Gordon and Sally Rausch deliver monologues wholly devoid of irony on the brilliance of Republicans from Grant to Hoover and sound like soap opera shrinks:

"He has been bitterly unhappy since Julia's remarriage." Waynesboro's genteel bigots are scarcely more compelling. Germans are "hucksters" and the Irish "pa pists." The enduring central themes of Ladies are the passage of years and the sense of moribund small-town life. These the author conveys effectively, if windily, as she regards time as "an accordion, all the air squeezed out of it as you grew old."

Santmyer has not played much of a tune on that instrument, but her honest attempt is remarkable for its attention to detail--and, of course, its longevity. One suspects, considering the circus surrounding the book, that it is the publisher who has oversold the song and dance.

FLYNN'S IN by Gregory Mcdonald

Mysterious Press; 201 pages; $15.95

M, c, small d. That Mcdonald. Not the late Ross Macdonald, creator of the estimable Lew Archer, nor John D. MacDonald, inventor of Travis McGee. Why three unrelated Americans with, more or less, the same Scottish clan name should have written some of the best detective stories of the past couple of decades is, appropriately enough, a mystery. But Gregory Mcdonald is appealingly fresh and impudent in his tales of Fletch, the irreverent reporter, and Flynn, the Boston supercop. The civilized and resourceful Inspector Francis Xavier Flynn is on duty here, spying out malefaction at something called the Rod and Gun Club, a secretive woodsy preserve for male members of the Eastern ruling class.

It is Mcdonald's agreeable fancy that loathsomely rich, ridiculous and powerful holders of old names and money have for decades maintained this refuge (in a region unspecified, but resembling the Adirondacks) on the model of a turn-of-the-century prep school: no women, food fights at table, silly songs, horseplay of the towel-snapping kind. One respected judge wears dresses here; another member wears nothing at all. Suddenly there is a murder, then another, then ... Flynn is invited to investigate. Who is expunging all of these parasites? While the venerable members scurry about hiding corpses, Flynn puzzles it through, though the murders themselves seem just and appropriate. This is shameless Establishment bashing and ideal under-the-beach-umbrella reading.

PIECE OF CAKE by Derek Robinson Knopf; 569 pages; $16.95

Time: 1939. Place: England. Situation: ominous. Their country is rushing toward World War II, but the lads of Hornet squadron, in this vivid, bittersweet epic of the R.A.F., believe that the coming Battle of Britain will be a piece of cake.

R.A.F. Veteran Derek Robinson, however, provides no propaganda romance. Within a year, the flyers' innocence has crashed in flames. By September 1940, most of Hornet squadron are dead, burned out or mad. Christopher Hart III, an egalitarian American volunteer, tells them, "Up there the world is divided into bastards and suckers. Make your choice." They do, and turn from chivalrous adolescents into cynical hawks. After flying hundreds of missions in a month, a dazed pilot hears of Churchill's famous R.A.F. speech: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." His reply: "Someone must have told him about our back pay."

Along with his black-and-blue humor, the author is unsparingly accurate about the R.A.F. 's highly inflated claims of shoot-downs and its antiquated early tactics. But he never loses admiration for the sacrificial pilot, and his sentiments are dead on target: midway between Catch 22 and The Winds of War. A natural for a PBS miniseries, Piece of Cake could run on Masterpiece Theater just as easy as pie.

D.V. by Diana Vreeland Knopf; 196 pages; $15.95

As the author herself might say, this book is not a grand'chose. Diana Vreeland has lived near the center of the fashion world all her life, as the wife of an international banker, as editor of Vogue, and currently as impresario of the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute.

Here she has taped some fairly scatty memoirs, edited by George Plimpton and Christopher Hemphill. The plentiful italics of her speech are faithfully reproduced along with chatty asides, myopic anecdotes and bits of advice (see a dentist early in the day because a tired one is "very tough on you").

D. V. can be irritating and trivial, but if one takes it on its own blithe terms it is highly enjoyable. Vreeland has the blunt realism of an old survivor (she is somewhere in her 80s), and the eye that made her career has not dimmed. The best colors? The yellow of a taxicab, the blue of the sky on Kennedy's Inauguration Day, the pink of a Provence carnation. Her hero is her husband of 46 years, whom she refers to almost solely in terms of his exquisite clothes--felt hats as smooth as satin, overcoats that Garbo loved. Helena Rubinstein is remembered for the beauty of her buttonholes, Clark Gable for the best eyelashes she ever saw. And if the tall stories about kings and playboys often ravel, the shrewdness and impersonal good humor of the storyteller are intact. Cole Porter, of course, wrote a couplet about Vreeland: "Here's Diana/ Sittin' on the piana." And that's where she has been, swinging her legs, for most of the century.

THE NORTH AMERICAN ANIMAL ALMANAC by Darryl Stewart Stewart, Tabori &Chang; 351 pages; $14.95 May is the best month for observing the grizzly bear, from a proper distance, of course. March is the best time to study the turkey vulture, especially in the tiny hamlet of Hinckley, Ohio, to which, like the swallows that regularly come back to Capistrano, the scavenging birds return every year. February, however, is not the ideal time to look for groundhogs. The woodchuck does awaken from his winter torpor earlier than most other ground animals but rarely as early as Feb. 2--unless roused from its den by meteorologists.

The creatures who populate the planet have always fascinated the one identified by Shakespeare as "the paragon of animals." Naturalist Darryl Stewart's entertaining Almanac shows why. Scarcely a creature crawls or jumps by without a tale.

The badger, Stewart notes, can tunnel into the earth so fast that ten men with shovels cannot keep him in sight. Texas horned toads can, when angry or excited, actually squirt blood from the corners of their eyes. No animal seems more, well, humane than the American lobster, as portrayed by Stewart. Most sea creatures are love-them-and-leave-them suitors, impregnating their mates, then allowing them to fend for themselves. Not the crustacean, whose mate must shed not only her defenses but her shell when she visits his underwater den. Sensing something about vulnerability, he lets her stay a week or more until her new shell is grown.

THE GODS, THE LITTLE GUYS AND THE POLICE by Humberto Costantini Harper & Row; 230 pages; $14.95

This is true gallows humor, bitter and funny, set in Argentina nearly ten years ago during that country's period of paramilitary repression. Left wing violence triggered a savage righ wing reaction, a protracted spasm of bloodthirstiness and fear among the police and the military. To be a professor, a student, a known reader of books, or even to be associated distantly with anyone who might be stigmatized as an intellectual, was to risk joining the "disappeared ones," which meant to be seized, bound, tortured, murdered and thrown into secret graves.

In extreme closeup, as in Argentine Publisher Jacobo Timerman's chilling book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, blood is blood and terror is terror. Withdraw to the appropriate distance, however, and the spectacle of a society obstinately destroying itself becomes a depersonalized, absurd comedy. The author, an Argentine now living in Mexico, withdraws all the way to Olympus. There Athena and Aphrodite, no less, concern themselves with protecting the hapless members of an apolitical poetry group that meets each week in Buenos Aires. They have been denounced to the police, and a surveillance has been mounted. The dread nether god Hades decrees that twelve of the poets shall be seized by a parapolice murder gang. Can Hades be tricked into abandoning his evil intention by the underworld nymph Mintho and Hermes, the lust distracted messenger god? Are the gods, in fact taking proper care of their silly, self-important human charges? Good questions, written it seems with a shaking hand, but proof read perhaps with a hopeful, some what unpracticed smile.

THE BUSINESSMAN by Thomas M. Disch Harper & Row; 292 pages; $14.50

Subtitled A Tale of Terror, this novel will horrify only those who believe that the gruesome should not also be funny. The macabre begins when Bob Glandier, a repulsively fat and wicked Twin Cities businessman, follows his runaway wife to the Lady Luck Motel in Las Vegas and murders her. In her grave back home in Minnesota, Giselle feels her spirit stir and realizes that she, like the heroine of the ballet Giselle, is destined to haunt her husband. Unfortunately, the escape from her moldering mortal remains requires the simultaneous death of her mother, who wakes up in "a kind of halfway house" to heaven. Mamma has access to a TV set on which she can call up any scene she wishes from her past life;in keeping with the restful atmosphere, an attending angel of mercy wears a nurse's hat just like the ones on General Hospital.

From this point on, things get complicated. Giselle meets the ghost of Poet John Berryman, still doing penance for his suicide jump into the Minnesota River. She also bears a demon child who invades the bodies of animals and people in order to kill all suspected enemies of ... Bob Glandier. In his tenth novel, Author Thomas M. Disch, 44, serves up such improbabilities with relish; the result is an entertaining nightmare out of Thomas Berger and Stephen King.

FREE AGENTS by Max Apple Harper & Row; 197 pages; $14.50

The satirical targets in this collection of stories and sketches may seem like the same old contemporary lemons, but look again. Max Apple (The Oranging of America, Zip) knows there is more than one way to make lemonade -- sometimes sweet, sometimes astringent, always bracing. Organ transplants? In the bizarre courtroom drama of the title piece, the author's vital parts try to protect themselves against being traded to another body by demanding the right to bargain as free agents. The video-electronic revolution?

In the surrealistic Pizza Time, a father vies with an infinity RAM chip in an arcade game for the souls of his children.

Apple is so often autobiographical that he sometimes slips between fiction and nonfiction. The result, as he concedes, is that "you think that I'm half kidding, though you're not quite sure about what."

Uneasiness ends when he is at his best, as in Bridging, about a bereaved husband who becomes an eager assistant leader of a Girl Scout troop from which his daughter drops out. Here Apple illuminates love and loss with tender humor and sadness, and he is obviously not kidding.