BOOKS SUMMER READING

SUMMER IS a wonderful season for reading exactly what you want to read, with no objective beyond simple pleasure. It’s time to put away Megatrends and John Naisbitt’s compelling vision of the future for the sunrise side of the country. And it’s okay to stop worrying about the implications of Kevin Phillips’ Post Conservative America, with its dour prophecies of political chaos, price revolution and repressive culture in a United States struggling to adapt to its twilight years. Both Naisbitt and Phillips have a little truth on their side, but June is not the proper month for such portentous argument. June has always done its best to gentle our condition.

With the American Booksellers Association meeting in Dallas this month, now is a fine time to seek out something new and arresting for the weekend or for your flight bag as you escape to somewhere else. For humor, you can do no better than Heartburn, Nora Ephron’s extremely funny novel that’s said to be a thinly veiled account of the breakup of her marriage to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. This may not sound like an amusing subject, but anybody who’s been through divorce will find much recognition here as well as plenty to laugh about -however ruefully.

There’s the initial courtship on the Eastern shuttle, with Ephron in New York (in Heartburn she’s Rachel Samstat, a cookbook writer who has her own show on Channel 13) and Mark in Washington (he’s a syndicated columnist who’s forever looking for material -sometimes in politics, sometimes in lifestyle, occasionally in Rachel’s group-therapy sessions).

There’s the marriage, followed by constant redecorating, travel with friends, more columns (one on a robbery that occurred during group) and more cookbooks. Then comes the birth of a son, followed by a second pregnancy. During the seventh month, Rachel discovers that Mark is having an affair with Thelma Rice, wife of Jonathan, who handles the Middle East desk at the State Department. Thelma, writes Ephron, has “a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed.”

Rachel leaves Mark and flees to her father in New York (he’s on his third marriage by now -to the sister of Rachel’s former best friend, Brenda). Mark flies up and persuades her to come back to Washington with him (on the Eastern shuttle, of course, but Rachel is miffed that Mark doesn’t offer to pay her fare). They have a second son, Nathaniel, who is born right after Rachel and Jonathan discover Mark and Thelma together again at the Rices’ house. Clearly, the reconciliation isn’t going to work. Rachel ends it for good after throwing a Key lime pie (recipe given) at Mark during a dinner with old friends who we thought would be a stabilizing influence. They weren’t. She leaves again, but not before teaching Mark how to make her superior vinaigrette dressing, the one for which she’s sure he married her in the first place (this, too, is an excellent recipe and worth the price of the book).

Word is that Ephron currently is living in New York, seeing various men and has definitely landed on her feet. She’s also become one of the top satirists of our time, ranking alongside Russell Baker and Art Buchwald.



ANOTHER CHANGE of pace for summer is The Sunne in Splendor, a first novel by Sharon Kay Penman, a lawyer and historian who goes to considerable lengths to build a case for Richard III contrary to the disastrous portrait Shakespeare etched of him. No longer deformed or demonic, Penman’s Richard is the sensitive son of a strong, powerful father who first led the House of York in the War of the Roses against Henry VI of Lancaster. Emotionally enfeebled and too pious for political reality, Henry left the business of the war to his wife, Margaret of Anjou, who fought with utmost pertinacity to protect the throne for her son and her husband’s family.

What is it about the War of the Roses that intrigues us so? For one thing, it was a war that involved valiant women. Margaret was a Frenchwoman who rode in the lone tradition of Joan of Arc, whose battles had been waged only a generation before against Henry’s father. Although vicious in victory and certainly no saint, Margaret had a steadfastness that was compelling.

But The Sunne in Splendor isn’t Margaret’s story. It’s designed to redeem her archenemy, Richard, who, Penman insists, did not order the murder of his young nephews in the tower to secure his claim to the crown. Penman sees Richard as a devoted husband and a principled king who paid mightily for his right to rule England.

Though the prose is not especially praiseworthy, the historical underpinnings of this book are impressive. If you don’t care about history, you can read it as a family feud carried to the hundredth power in which the stakes are definitive. The Sunne in Splendor is sometimes touched by sentimentality, but that’s not all bad if you enjoy an occasional cry with your summer reading. I do.



THIS CAN also be the season for looking back to the classics of other generations. Who wouldn’t benefit from another June devoted to Tolstoy’s Anna Kare-nina? I remember first believing that Anna was a fool to give up everything for the love of Count Vronsky. That was before I understood what it was like to be desperate, which surely she was.

And what went wrong with Anna and Vronsky? A friend put it this way: “She was never able to comfort him; nor could she permit him to comfort her. It was always an affair. It never settled into a relationship.” A good analysis.

Then there’s Howards End, E.M. For-ster’s brilliant novel about another Margaret (why are strong Englishwomen so often named Margaret?). This book is full of memorable insights: “Separate those human beings who will hurt each other the most; the rest can wait.” And, “Money’s educational; it’s far more educational than the things it buys.” Or (to paraphrase), better to be taken unprepared than prepared and not taken. Or, “Only connect….”



WHILE THUMBING through the works of the Bloomsbury group, most of them compatriots of Forster, you could do worse than to spend some time with the Letters of Virginia Woolf. Available now in six volumes, you can choose any era and find her breathtakingly charming. There’s seldom a hint of the depression that dogged most of her life. Woolf wrote these letters, I suspect, to break the sense of isolation that depression imposed upon her and to “connect,” as her friend Forster advised.



YOU CAN always find something fascinating in the memoirs of Lillian Hellman, who will be 79 this month. An Unfinished Woman is still her best, but the vignettes in Pentimento have a fine sense of style. Then there’s Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, whose A Woman of Independent Means recalls a past generation and whose best seller Life Sentences concerns contemporary women.

In Path to Power, Robert Caro does to LBJ what Shakespeare did to Richard III. Read it if you want to know the worst about the former president. Those who followed Texas politics during the early Sixties and earlier realize that much of it has to be true. All the same, someday Johnson will deserve a Sharon Kay Penman.

Biography tends to be kinder to poets. At least that’s true for Robert Browning. In A Life Within Life, Donald Thomas illumines Browning’s career as a poet, his devastating failure as a playwright and his successful though complicated midlife marriage to Elizabeth Barrett. It’s reassuring summer reading for those whose real interest is not English letters but love among the middle-aged.