Wide-Bodies On the Runway

By John Skow

Your connecting flight has been delayed another three hours, and you feel as if you are getting a lavender tan from the lighting. You are buzzed on cardboard coffee and too woozy from an airborne snackoid served on your incoming flight to risk alcohol. But do you despair? Of course you do. Do you give up? Certainly, by reaching into your flight bag and withdrawing one of this season's airport novels. You know the kind. Literary wide-bodies with plenty of plot that allow you to leave the real world in the first half paragraph and stay away through several flight-delay announcements. No-qual prose and cereal-box characters are customary, though an occasional lapse into good writing does no harm. The Odyssey and Moby Dick, both wide-bodies before their time, would have been perfect airport novels. Herewith a random grab of half a dozen new airporters, none written by Homer or Herman Melville:

LADY BOSS, by Jackie Collins (Simon & Schuster; 608 pages; $21.95), offers the reader a rare opportunity to watch adverbs mate. "Slowly, languorously" the naughty parts of speech tumble about during the sex scenes. But why aren't the scenes sexier? Never mind. The point of the story is to watch "darkly, exotically" beautiful but ruthless, yet sensitive and vulnerable female tycoon Lucky Santangelo -- she heads a billion-dollar shipping company but doesn't seem to go to the office much -- knife her way to ownership of Panther films, a big Hollywood studio. This she does without telling her actor husband ("Lennie was tall and lanky, with dirty-blond hair and ocean-green eyes"), who is having contract troubles with Panther. Alas, she fails to consider that Lennie's fierce male pride will curdle when she reveals herself as his boss. Disaster! And he . . . And she . . .

MEMORIES OF MIDNIGHT, by Sidney Sheldon (Morrow; 399 pages; $21.95), is one of a large and growing subgenre of evil-Greek-shipowner thrillers. Nasty fellows, those fictional Greek shipowners. This one, rich and loathsome Constantin Demiris, has arranged that his unfaithful mistress and her lover, Demiris' pilot, be executed for the supposed murder of the pilot's wife, beautiful, trusting American Catherine Alexander. But he is still angry, and he strides about his villa like Richard III, gloating in a long, italic aside about what he is going to do to Catherine, who lost her memory during a boat explosion and has been living in a rich, evil nunnery owned by Demiris. "It's too bad I can't afford to let her live," he whispers to empty air. "But first -- my vengeance I'm going to enjoy myself with her." Reading Sheldon's drivel offers an important reassurance: travelers who stick with Demiris and Catherine till the end can endure whatever misery the airlines throw at them.

SURRENDER THE PINK, by Carrie Fisher (Simon & Schuster; 286 pages; $18.95), is the sort of novel writers write between novels, about the sort of love affair a young woman might have between affairs. It has the odd quality of being funny and well written, despite an occasional outbreak of coupling adverbs ("passionately, tenderly"). But it is utterly unmemorable. The author can't seem to care much about her heroine, a pretty but underexposed young woman named Dinah Kaufman who writes soap operas in Los Angeles. Although Dinah likes sex and wants to be in love, the men she meets are either too strong or too weak, never just right. In fact, the reader decides, the men are handsome fakes, big-jawed 42 regulars snipped from a Ralph Lauren ad to act out Dinah's problem. They meet Dinah in a fake world, where no one has money troubles and there's nothing between Los Angeles and East Hampton.

THE POWER, by James Mills (Warner; 406 pages; $21.95), is a brave and probably foolhardy try at combining the structure of a conventional spy thriller with what spy fans are likely to consider a lot of annoying nonsense about occult forces and psychic phenomena. Jack Hammond is a U.S. spy who gets caught between two beautiful Soviet witches. Evil, gorgeous Darya can dematerialize herself and drive men mad with multiple orgasms. She can also fox computer memories and detonate nuclear warheads. Good, gorgeous Valentina uses the power of Jesus for psychic healing. Hammond's problem is to keep sickly General Secretary Yuri Andropov alive until Mikhail Gorbachev is able to take over. This reader's problem is that he doesn't believe a word of it.

FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT, by Stephen King (Viking; 763 pages; $22.95), offers a quartet of horror novellas that show this vexing and engaging storyteller at close to his best. What has always charmed and exasperated about King's enormous run of books is a quality not exactly childlike -- James Thurber could be childlike, and so could E.B. White -- but rather teenager-like. The early teens, at that; King is stuck permanently at about 13 1/2. He bops through these stories with the mischievous imagination of a young adolescent, and also the wearying energy, sloppiness, ignorance and complete lack of subtlety and taste. At the length of a good ghost story, he is amusing and enjoyable with spooky stuff about, for example, an airliner, most of whose passengers disappear as it flies, leaving behind (wow!) their tooth fillings and pacemakers; and a well-sketched village miser who steals a Polaroid camera that obstinately produces shots of (eek!) a savage dog.

THE FIRST MAN IN ROME, by Colleen McCullough (Morrow; 896 pages; $22.95), is a truly astonishing work, the first of five planned volumes about life -- mostly political life -- in ancient Rome. Robert Graves covered this ground, in I, Claudius, and so did Shakespeare, for that matter. McCullough, who wrote The Thorn Birds, is not awed, and her narration marches sturdily through a period of fascinating turmoil in the last years of the Republic. Terrifying German barbarians have wiped out most of Rome's legions. The Senate dithers; Gaius Marius, a wealthy military man of low birth, has the energy but not the bloodline to save the situation. The author is interested in everything: how the city's sewers worked, how marriages were arranged, and how the horsehair plumes in a soldier's helmet could be detached for storage. She has drawn maps and even portraits of her characters, and supplied an encyclopedic glossary. The result, though dangerously overweight, is airport fiction at its best.