(3 of 5)
In the land of the adult fairy tale, where almost anything can occur, he does indeed return the Bums to New York. But not without a few obstacles, including a sanctimonious baseball commissioner, a girl who throws like Sandy Koufax and the demolition of a housing project to make way for the old stadium, resurrected brick by brick. When installed, the once and future team manages to win the pennant. But not the World Series. Ritz is a skilled and witty novelist, but he realizes that even in fantasy some dreams remain impossible.
THE SHOOTING PARTY by Isabel Colegate Viking; 195 pages; $11.95
The scene is an 8,000-acre estate in Oxfordshire. Some very upper-class English have assembled to enjoy the hospitality of their host, Sir Randolph Nettleby, and three days of partying and shooting in the crisp fall weather. The month is October and the year is 1913. A novel set in this place and time automatically creates a reserve of ready-made poignancy: the insular, comfortable people of the period had no idea what the guns of August 1914 would bring. But Author Isabel Colegate does not exploit this sentiment. The coming Great War is, naturally, a fact of which her characters are unaware, and so, except for a few vague anxieties, they cannot think of it. They have other concerns. Sir Randolph worries whether the beaters will be able to flush a sufficient number of pheasants. One of his grandsons wanders about, trying to find a lost pet duck. Some of the ladies continue or inaugurate amorous intrigues. The two best marksmen at the shooting party fall into an intense, ungentlemanly competition over who will bag the most birds.
Colegate handles her large cast of guests, servants and outsiders so that everyone seems singular, from the lord of the manor to the local poacher. When these sharply etched characters gather in the field for a hunt, they seem to inhabit a fine old photograph, illuminated from behind by an approaching flame.
TURNAROUND by Don Carpenter Simon & Schuster; 253 pages; $13.95
Turnaround proves that it is a lot cheaper to write a Hollywood novel than to make a Hollywood film. For one thing, Author Don Carpenter, 50, gets Paul Newman to make two cameo appearances without paying him a dime. The other, fictitious actors also come free. Jerry Rexford is an aspiring young screenwriter who supports himself by doing editing jobs at a trade journal called Pet Care Hotline. One of his scripts catches the attention of Rick Heidelberg, a Wunderkind director-producer desperately looking for a property that will match his first, and only, success. Heidelberg must deal with a formidable studio head named Alexander Hellstrom, who is beginning to wonder if all of his wealth and power truly means anything.
Some variant of this story has been told, filmed and staged many times: Making and Losing It in Tinseltown. Carpenter does not try to extend this formula, but neither does he take it seriously. The plot is chiefly an excuse for the author to insert some of the inside information about Hollywood that he picked up over the twelve years he worked there. He shows how deals are made, who gets the money and how easily a film project can go into turnaround, i.e., fall apart. Luckily, Carpenter's breezy, irreverent story hangs together.
ELLIS ISLAND & OTHER STORIES by Mark Helprin Delacorte; 196 pages; $10.95