Best Seller Preview : The Hot Flash as Breaking News

Bound galleys are the handmaidens of hardcover publishing--self-effacing, bland little pre-publication copies that go scurrying out to the trade, trying to raise “early interests.” But a publisher who’s sunk six figures into an advance needs to be sure his book will stand out in the crowd--so the advance reading copy was invented, a flashier relation of the bound galley that sports a full-color cover and full-size format. This month’s best-seller candidates are all reading copies, and everything about them trumpets: “Pay attention, I am a big book.”

Diana Sargeant, the 48-year-old anthropology professor heroine of Barbara Raskin’s Hot Flashes (St. Martin’s: $18.95) keeps a “Hot Flashes” notebook into which she enters biologically triggered revelations, because “. . . my hot flashes have begun to feel like urgent communiques from the interior of a vast, dark continent--fast-breaking news items from my heart of darkness.” If you can handle the hormonal leitmoti1714167929”The Big Chill”: Sukie, the eccentric writer and abandoned wife, dies suddenly, and her three friends--didactic Diana, forlorn Elaine, and Joanne, an oxymoronically wealthy free-lance magazine writer--congregate for her funeral. On one lost weekend, they learn a lot about life from encounters with (1) each other, (2) Sukie’s perfervid diary and (3) an assortment of old flames, new fires and family. They ingest a fair number of controlled substances, estrogen not among them.

Elaine, the crankiest of Raskin’s characters until she finds a good man (one of a few stray retro concepts that belie Raskin’s insistent feminism), actually complains about comparisons to “The Big Chill” because she doesn’t like real life being reduced to a movie reference. Raskin doesn’t seem to mind: She’s sold the novel to Weintraub Entertainment, possibly to be directed by Richard Benjamin and star Barbra Streisand. For starters, St. Martin’s will print 200,000 copies of the Book-of-the-Month Club featured alternate, spend $200,000 on ads and promotion and send Raskin on a national tour. Whether anyone will merchandise “Hot Flashes” notebooks remains to be seen.

We are a generation of Type-A females--grown-up Depression babies who disregarded all risks and used birth-control pills, cigarettes, Valium, Percodan, and alcohol all at the same time. We also liked Dexedrine. Ah, diet pills. We were never slim enough. We wanted there to be a space-to-see-through between our thighs when we stood on sandy beaches. There seldom was, and our weight fluctuations haunted us from decade to decade. We lost and gained the same 10 pounds year after year and only pretended to prefer wearing loose long shirts outside our jeans instead of tucked in with a narrow belt.

We are not, like the flappers, a happy-go-lucky crowd. Many of us can be identified by the permanent silver bracelets we wear around our wrists, pale raised scars of unsuccessful suicide attempts. Lots of us have had our heads shrunk and some of us have already had our hearts, minds, and faces lifted in a variety of ways. In self-defense, we tried to stave off bitterness with black humor, and because we were funny, we were upgraded to hostesses’ “A” lists so that we could flash our wit at their drunken dinner parties.

We have read and written lots of books about women like us and the way we live now. Most of our favorite writers turn out to have been feminists. We loved Colette, but we also admired her husband, who kept her locked up each day until she wrote a certain number of pages. We were early fans of Virginia Woolf and also of her suicide--the way she walked into the river, just like that. Boom. We like novels such as “My Old Sweetheart,” “Play It as It Lays,” “Speedboat,” and “Sleepless Nights.” Our biggest turn-on books are “Fanny Hill,” “Forever Amber,” and “Lolita.”

“We don’t need husbands,” Joanne once said. “What we need are editors.” We could also have used road managers, salad chefs, certified accountants, fashion consultants, pit-stop auto mechanics, research interns, stenographers, and various other support staff. It was Joanne who said that the only “staff” she ever had was the infectious kind. What we all needed was a wife; we just weren’t liberated enough to realize it.

Since most of the books we enjoyed were about women like us, many of us began writing fiction. We found this career quite suitable, since writing didn’t require attendance at an office and could be conducted off-season during off-hours in an offhand, off-the-record sort of way. At the very least, writing could be used as an answer when someone asked, “And what do you do?” (“About what?” Alice used to reply before becoming an author.)

--From “Hot Flashes”

British author Shirley Conran’s first novel, “Lace,” became a miniseries, and so will Savages (Simon & Schuster: $19.95), the story of five women who shed their inhibitions, and most of their clothing, trying to survive in an island jungle. It seems that you can, indeed, be too thin or too rich: Five women accompany their husbands on a business trip to the island of Paui, and, when the men are murdered in a political coup, the women face a gruesome end; the natives are not only restless, they are cannibals.

The women decide to make a break for freedom, dropping that unsightly extra poundage on a diet of rat stew and snake--and never, ever, dropping their white upper-class disdain for heathens of color and their nasty habits. No matter how hungry the girls get, they will not hack each other up into tenderloins. “Savages” has everything--men in power, albeit briefly, beautiful wealthy women in jeopardy, a soupcon of sex and a pinch of white female chauvinism. Lorimar Pictures will do the miniseries honors, while Simon & Schuster does a 250,000-copy first printing of this Literary Guild Main Selection--$1.5 million has been collected for British rights alone.

The ladies got off light, actually, when compared to Adolf Hitler, who meets a particularly gratifying end thanks to the efforts of Russian special agent Valily Petrov in Joseph Heywood’s The Berkut (Random House: $18.95), under orders from Josef Stalin to find the Nazi leader and bring him back alive, to spend his days in caged captivity.

Although Hitler supposedly committed suicide, he was actually spirited out of the bunker where an imposter died in his place. Now he is Herr Wolf--nose broken, mustache and head shaven, a fake concentration camp number tattooed on his arm--who will escape justice and slip away unless Petrov and his men can follow his carefully covered trail.

The basic subject matter is hardly new (Remember Irving Wallace’s “The Seventh Secret”?), but Heywood has fashioned a mesmerizing thriller after what is reported to have been something of a publishing cliffhanger. Random House editor Joseph Fox shepherded the manuscript through a 14-month triple rewrite before the publisher actually bought it. Hard work has its rewards: Random House will print 150,000 copies of this Book-of-the-Month Club Selection and already has a $200,000-paperback floor (minimum) bid.

American media are suddenly obsessed with a more recent war, the one in Vietnam, but Christie Dickason writes about what happened before we got there in Indochine (Villard: $18.95), a novel about decades of conflict between the people of Indochina and French settlers. When French-government opium traders kill Luan Hoc’s father, he murders his father’s killer and marries Ariane, the man’s French fiancee. Luan Hoc makes his fortune in opium trading when a Sicilian mobster finds his suppliers unwilling to sell to a foreigner--and then his daughter, Nina, goes into the business, only to find that her occupation presents an obstacle to her romance with an American journalist.

“Indochine” does everything a romantic epic is supposed to do--spans decades, passes unfinished emotional business from one generation to the next and spices the story with sex, drugs and, if not rock ‘n’ roll, gamelan music for novelty value. First published last year in Great Britain, “Indochine” will get a 75,000-copy American send-off backed by a $75,000-ad/promo budget and an author tour.

On another plain altogether--the Salisbury Plain in southern England, to be exact--the 1,000-page story of Sarum (Crown: $19.95) unfolds, as author Edward Rutherfurd rolls through a mere 11,987 years of history, give or take a few weeks. From the moment the temperature rises at the end of the Ice Age, to the day in 7500 BC when one hunter’s temperature rises for another hunter’s wife, to the meeting in 1985 of two once-overheated lovers, Rutherfurd traces the history of England through the history of Sarum--which, like Rutherfurd, is a fictional name, in the author’s case protecting a 38-year-old Cambridge scholar who wanted to avoid the “disaster” of notoriety in the United States. He’s in trouble: Crown will print 100,000 copies and spend $150,000 on this Book-of-the-Month Club alternate.