KEEPERS OF THE KEYS
by Wilton Wynn
Random House; 278 pages; $18.95
When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his aide and preferred successor, Archbishop Giovanni Battista Montini, was ineligible for the papacy because he was not a Cardinal. As a stopgap, the Cardinal-electors turned to the apparently innocuous Angelo Giuseppi Roncalli, 76. Roncalli, of course, became Pope John XXIII, whose Vatican Council set in motion epochal reforms in the church. But Montini, who was made a Cardinal by John, finally got his turn after John died in 1963, and it was his dogged bureaucratic talents, as Pope Paul VI, that made the sweeping new policies stick. Thus, writes Wilton Wynn, “the old Cardinals locked up in each successive conclave chose as Pope precisely the personality most needed at the moment.” Wynn, a correspondent in TIME’s Rome bureau from 1962 to 1985, offers a memoir of his Vatican watching during those years that is at once authoritative and anecdotal. He treats each of the three Popes in this book as a unique individual who put his personal stamp on the church, but he is most fascinating on the subject of the present Pontiff, John Paul II. In a highly unusual private dinner with the author, the Pope confided that he “could sense” his own election near the beginning of 1978’s second conclave. Wynn’s most provocative assertion: the Vatican at the “highest level” believes that the Soviet Union engineered the 1981 attempt on John Paul’s life in order to deprive the restive Poles of their leading symbol of national identity.
PRIZZI’S GLORY
by Richard Condon
Dutton; 273 pages; $17.95
O.K., lissena this. Richard Condon useta write very funny stuff, right up there with George V. Higgins, but lately there is too much stuff and not enough funny. Mainly, this third book of the Prizzi series, about the good-guy Mafia assassin Charley Partanna, needs a dose of bran. In Condon’s mad early novels — The Oldest Confession, The Manchurian Candidate — marvelous characters seethed with venality and obsession. In the current book there is still enough corruption to go around, but not much narrative drive. Condon’s Mafia greedsters now own 32% of what there is to own in the U.S., “only five points down on the Japanese.” Old, frail, evil Don Corrado hits on the up-to- date notion of getting out of street crime and franchising it to black, Hispanic and Oriental gangs, thus achieving really big bucks and respectability. But instead of telling the story, Condon endlessly tells about it. Characters do not take on their own faces or voices, and when the lowbrow Partanna is made to say, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Pop. Shoot the bell ringer,” it sounds phony. That’s not Charley; it’s Condon stopping the action to tell one more joke.
JEAN STAFFORD: A BIOGRAPHY
by David Roberts
Little, Brown; 494 pages; $24.95
“There are no second acts in American lives,” Scott Fitzgerald famously remarked. But in the lives of American writers, there often is one, and it is the second act of Long Day’s Journey into Night: a downward spiral of drink, disillusion and self-destructiveness. Jean Stafford followed just such a pattern, all the more regrettably because her first act was so full of energy % and promise. Fresh from a Colorado upbringing, she married Poet Robert Lowell and at 29 published the best seller Boston Adventure. Other marriages and other books followed, and so did poor health and a passel of troubles, many self-inflicted. By the time her Collected Stories won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970, she had long since fallen silent as a fiction writer and would remain so right up to her death, at 63, in 1979. David Roberts’ workmanlike biography generously quotes Stafford’s inimitable prose voice — elegant, tough, mordantly funny. It is a voice that is sadly neglected in today’s literary scene.
STORY OF MY LIFE
by Jay McInerney
Atlantic Monthly Press
189 pages; $16.95
Whose life is this, anyway? Alison Poole, not yet 21, is studying acting at the Strasberg Institute and excess at the end of a coke spoon. She is the protagonist of this fleet, frequently nasty and fitfully funny chronicle of drug delirium, sexual excess and committed shallowness during the dimming of the 1980s. She devotes so much time to getting off, in so many ways, that it is a wonder she found time to lend her voice to the narration. As he demonstrated in his 1984 Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney knows this turf and its voices (“I’m like, it’s two in the afternoon, for Christ’s sake. Most normal people have already been to sleep at least once already”). But, as in Bright Lights, McInerney is best at being mean; the novel is too shrill, too chill for compassion. Social satire may not demand a big heart, but moralizing does, and when McInerney tries to put a bleak cautionary spin onto the proceedings, the book goes out of control, just like Alison’s life, and comes crashing down, leaving no trace.
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