NOVEL CONTEST : LISTENERS WRITE RADIO SHOW FINALE

When Susan Stamberg, the host of National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition,” decided to invite her listeners to write the final chapter of the program’s 24-week-old “chain novel,” she expected about 30 “budding Dostoevskys” to send in their manuscripts.

“We’ve had contests before at the network,” Stamberg says. “We once asked people to send in the name of their favorite hamburger joint and only 100 people wrote in. And that was easy. Asking people to write 2 1/2 pages of fiction is so hard.”

Nevertheless, 400 listeners and weekend authors dusted off their old typewriters and banged out their own tiny epochs, flooding the NPR mailbox with hundreds of conclusions to “Seeing the Light”--”Weekend Edition’s” whimsical answer to the Dickensian serial novel.

Each week since Stamberg’s arts and news magazine (Sundays, 8-10 a.m. on KPCC-FM (89.3), KCSN-FM (88.5) and KCRW-FM (89.9) ) premiered last Jan. 24, noted novelists--including David Leavitt, Scott Spencer, Christopher Buckley and George Plimpton--have been trying to one-up each other with their sometimes clever, always bizarre installments in the continuing saga of their star character, Fiona Mackensie, a former southern beauty queen and TV evangelist who lectures her adoring flock with a “mixture of gynecology and free will.”

The old-time radio soap opera anticipation of what each new author would do with the chapter that came before had become, Stamberg says, the show’s greatest appeal. Week after week, listeners and aspiring best-selling authors would tune in to discover what wacky adventure was awaiting the characters they’d come to know over their Sunday coffee.

Meanwhile, in Downers Grove, Ill., Chris Saricks, 39, an environmental scientist who researches transportation and nuclear issues, was up early each Sunday, making breakfast for his two young children while his wife traipsed off to the local library to work on a book of her own.

“If she’d been home to take care of the kids on Sundays,” Saricks says, “I never would have heard the program. I would have been sound asleep in bed.”

But Saricks, who says he hasn’t written a piece of fiction since his college days 19 years ago, listened each week as the novel twisted and turned, and, one day, after Stamberg announced the contest, he heard Sir Alec Guinness on the radio reading from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” In a moment of inspiration, he whipped out a chapter and sent it to Washington.

“I saw the chain novel as something like a cross-country relay, where you grab the torch and try to keep it blazing as brightly as possible until you hand it off to the next person,” Saricks says. “I was pleased with what I sent in, but I didn’t tie up many of the story’s loose ends.”

Instead Saricks decided that the novel, which for weeks had been plagued by death, blood and mayhem, needed a happy ending. He sent the “old lady from Illinois”--the novel’s author of the novel within the novel and the fictional creator of the fictional Fiona--down to Fiona’s Missouri mansion to meet her creation and to explain to her that sometimes characters take on a life of their own. And though Stamberg insists that this final chapter is anything but “gushy,” these two characters, their breathing synchronized, their hearts beating as one, walk off together into the proverbial sunset.

“This chapter transcended the material,” says Richard Bausch, novelist and author of the chain novel’s Chapter 12, who unwittingly agreed to judge the contest before he knew he’d have to wade through 400 entries. “It was better than all the other stuff (the first 24 chapters written by 24 published authors) that preceded it. It managed to say something that was humorous and enlightening about this culture, about a capacity to make myths out of our celebrities. It didn’t tie up all the loose ends, but it managed to make it all add up to something.”

Bausch, whose books include “Take Me Back,” “Real Presence” and “Spirits,” says he stayed up two full nights to read all 400 chapters, and he was surprised by the level of sophistication of much of the writing.

“There was even a chapter by a 10-year-old that was pretty sophisticated,” says Bausch, who, though not likely to subject himself to something like this again soon, seemed to relish his role as “cultural arbiter” and all the attention from major newspapers, which often ignore his work.

Saricks’ winning chapter was the fourth or fifth entry that Bausch read, and he immediately set it aside as the standard for all the rest. Though a few came close, none, Bausch thought, could beat it.

Saricks says he was stunned when Stamberg called him at his Chicago laboratory to tell him he’d won and that he’d have to read his chapter over the air this Sunday. And though his wife did take him to lunch as a reward for his success, he insists that all the notoriety and praise for his writing ability he’s received this week are not about to change his life or his occupational aspirations.

“This is my Andy Warhol 15 minutes,” Saricks says. “I did it as a whimsical thing. I’m way too lazy to ever knuckle down and write more fiction.”

Though this radio serialization will finally be shelved on Sunday, Stamberg and her “Weekend Edition” staff have another--this one a mystery novel--planned for the fall.