Bookends: Apr. 28, 1986

I’LL TAKE MANHATTAN

by Judith Krantz

Crown; 437 pages; $18.95

“Maxi squirmed in her Calvin Klein jockstrap. They’d added a new dimension to her sex life. Was she a pervert?” The question could only be put by Judith Krantz, back again with her patented blend of eavesdropping and name dropping. Her heroine, Maxi Amberville (“her surpassingly green eyes, the precise color of Imperial Jade”), is the customary flaring, rich, tousled, naughty, gorgeous protean number. This time she is a publishing vicereine with a field of ex-husbands, a bewitching mother, a homosexual brother, a heterosexual near-blind brother, and an eleven-year-old daughter by magnificent, “fascinatingly brooding, darkly luminous” Renaissance Rocco. From Maxi’s view at the top, Krantz scatters a lot of glitz: hot seawater bubble baths, iced buffalo-grass vodka, tarte Tatin, Pratesi sheets, Don Johnson, Le Cirque and the Bohemian Grove. But she never forgets the essentials: steamy dialogue, unexpurgated sex and the outside chance that some of her fictive creatures may actually exist. I’ll Take Manhattan is not literature, but it is lively and, in its own way, moral. In any Krantz work, the good get loved, and that is what makes it romantic. The bad get punished, and that is what makes it fiction.

BARDOT, DENEUVE, FONDA

by Roger Vadim

Simon & Schuster; 328 pages; $17.95

Some men kiss and do not tell; they are called gentlemen. Some men tell but do not kiss; they are called liars. Some men kiss and tell; they are called best- seller writers. The latest is Director Roger Vadim, who modestly subtitles his work “My Life with the Three Most Beautiful Women in the World.” No. 1: Brigitte Bardot. She was 15, he was 22. When they parted, he was forgiving: “She always suffered if she had an affair with more than one man at a time.” No. 2: Catherine Deneuve. She was 17, he was 32. Not long afterward she announced she was pregnant, he recalls, and “from that day on, she never cried in my arms after making love.” No. 3: Jane Fonda. Progress. She was of legal age (24), he was 34, and “at that time she still knew how to relax. A few hours of idleness was not a mortal sin.” But today, well, “being a political figure, an exceptional businesswoman, an active supporter of her husband’s career, a conscientious mother, a producer, a writer and an international star is a bit much for one person.” Alas, the women all had the audacity to change. Only Vadim, 58, author, actor, filmmaker, narcissist, has managed to keep his outlook and ego evergreen. “When I came into the world,” he laments, “I must have come to the wrong civilization.” Exactement.

BUS 9 TO PARADISE

by Leo Buscaglia

Slack; 276 pages; $16.95

Some people think that war and mass destruction are turn-offs. Why is it so hard for many of us to break from the bondage of negativism? I believe it was another man named Leo–Leo Tolstoy–who named one of his fine books War and Peace. He was saying to us, “Grab life by the throat and hug it.” If he wasn’t saying this, who cares? We all make mistakes. Why are we so hard on ourselves? Take me, for instance. Sometimes a tiny voice tells me, “Leo, you are creating soft-centered, runny confections again.” But then I think: There’s new stuff here. There’s the part about how you can make cleaning your house a vibrant symphony of joyous motion, and the big uplift when my cat turned out to have one of the highest feline IQs ever tested. There’s a lesson in all this: deactualize all those shoulds and musts. I believe it was Clint Eastwood who observed, “Let love make your day.” I could go on like this forever . . .

THE WAR

by Marguerite Duras

Translated by Barbara Bray

Pantheon; 183 pages; $13.95

Several years ago, French Screenwriter and Author Marguerite Duras recovered some notebooks stashed away in a cupboard. They dated from the last days of World War II, and in them she had recorded her anguished waiting for news of her husband, a concentration camp deportee. The diary she later published as The War records his return; he was so emaciated and weak that the weight of a cherry would lacerate his stomach. Duras also includes a chilling portrait of the Gestapo officer who arrested her husband and who then, impressed by Duras’s literary reputation, tried to court her, confiding his dreams of owning an art bookshop. Duras does not neglect the vengeful postwar period, when Resistance members continued the battle, taking their turn at torturing and executing collaborators. No recent memoir has evoked the 1940s in France so eloquently or paid such close attention to suffering and emotional numbness. The diarist spares no one, neither the victims, the victors, the reader nor herself.