(5 of 7)
Ann Beattie's third novel is set in Vermont, which seems to most of her characters only a short ego trip away from Manhattan and Los Angeles. The new publisher of Country Daze, a Perrier-and-lime sort of publication, remarks: "I discriminate enough to know who means most to me. I mean most to me." So, apparently, does everyone else. Lucy Spenser, who writes a Miss Lonelyhearts column for the magazine under the pen name Cindi Coeur, is having a sporadic affair with her editor Hildon and trying to figure out why her old friend Les dumped her. Lucy's summer is further disrupted by the arrival of her niece Nicole, a teenage star of the TV soap opera Passionate Intensity. Others follow in Nicole's sudsy wake, including a writer working on a novelization of Nicole's program and an artist making models for a Nicole doll that must go on the market soon, while the original is still famous.
Beattie keeps the pace of her story brisk and the atmosphere antic but genial. People who assume that TV and gossip columns can bestow meaning on their lives might come in for criticism in some quarters. Not here. Reading Love Always is as easy and relaxing as watching a field of fireflies at dusk.
THE INTERNATIONAL GARAGE SALE
by Stefan Kanfer
Norton; 224 pages; $13.95
"History occurs twice," Stefan Kanfer writes at the outset of The International Garage Sale, quoting Karl Marx, "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." Some 200 pages later, many of them stingingly funny, Kanfer ends his novel invoking the same message. Yet the novel itself lies somewhere on the continuum between tragedy and farce. Ostensibly it is a sardonic burlesque of the United Nations (here thinly disguised as the World Body) and its present-day cast of characters, but underneath runs a current of sadness that the ideals of the 1940s have been overrun by the travesties of the '80s. One veteran envoy, producing an old Esperanto primer, even remembers when "one universal language would make war obsolete."
In the cacophony of today's voices, Kanfer, a senior editor of TIME, invents some delightful ones of his own: an aging sleight-of-hand artist called the Wizard, who sets up a fake country; an oil-rich emir who produces a TV sitcom to sell his political message with reworked Borscht Belt shtick; a splendidly confused interpreter who adores women's legs and finds his paradise among the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. Serious evil--the garage sale of the title --lurks here too, and the hero, a TV newsman, finds, as so many innocent investigators do these days, that iniquity, like cream, rises to the top. But neither he nor Kanfer is completely daunted. In this zany and touching book, the author laughs all the way to hope.
IN CUSTODY
by Anita Desai
Harper & Row; 204 pages; $16.95