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Stick your thumb in the popular novel...

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Stick your thumb in the popular novel pie in the dog days of August and what do you pull out? You name it: fluff, historic romances, family epics, skin-crawling mood pieces, and outrageously trendy exposes of the rich and famous. Welcome to August, 1989, when imagination runs amok. Two previews must suffice.

The indefatigable Belva Plain, she of “Evergreen,” “Tapestry,” and half a dozen other family epics is back in high emotional gear again with Blessings, in which her heroine, Jennie Rakowsky, is her own worst enemy. A single, highly successful New York lawyer specializing in human rights and environmental issues, Jennie carries her Jewish-immigrant parents’ heavy sense of family and duty around her neck like an albatross. A burden exacerbated by a 19-year-old guilt trip stemming from the illegitimate daughter she bore, and gave away, while still in college. It might be understandable why Jennie has hidden this secret so long from her traditionalist family but now, on the brink of her marriage to a highly successful corporate lawyer, a widower who also has been shielded from this little indiscretion, the daughter that she has denied for so long surfaces like an unwanted cat. Never mind that in the 1980s illegitimacy isn’t quite the verboten topic it was in her parents’ day, the daughter’s determination to track down and get to know her real mother sends Jennie flying apart like a stale graham cracker--dropping her fiance and abandoning the heavy- duty environmental case in which she is involved with equal abruptness. The daughter, one of those sparkly types without a mean bone in her body, not only perseveres, but--for good measure--also digs up her natural father, single and with more than a still-flickering interest in the basket case that is now Jennie. All of this is naturally resolved with the inventiveness that we associate with novelist Plain, but not before the ground is soggy with tears of guilt, remorse, unrequited love, requited love and all emotions in between. This is a dual main selection of the Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club as well as a selection of the Reader’s Digest Collection.

Thomas Tryon’s The Night of the Moonbow ambles leisurely into its story line without the slightest hint that, before it’s over, you’ll have chewed your fingernails down to the nub. What could be more pastoral than a group of squeaky-clean teen-age boys in 1938 sharing the joys of a Bible-oriented summer camp called Friend-Indeed in the backwaters of rural Connecticut? Even when we are tipped off to the fact that a new boy, an orphan with a secret in his background, may present problems when he is injected into this hotbed of pubescent conformity, we still aren’t prepared for the relentless feeling of dread that comes over us. On the surface, certainly, Leo Joaquim (Wacko Wackeem as he is soon dubbed) has none of the colorations of the classic “trouble-maker.” Obviously intelligent, talented and witty, Wacko is also obsessively eager to please his new friends, touchingly grateful to have been admitted to the camp and, in short order, is the camp’s fiercest defender of those corny traditions and rituals that teen-agers hold so sacred. Still and all, Wacko doesn’t quite fit. Minor frictions lead to minor hazings, but escalation is taking place and the rift between this square peg, Wacko, and his rounder-than-round senior counselor, Reece Hartsig--Mr. Perfect in everyone’s eyes --begins taking a sinister turn. Bit by bit, in the chilling technique that author Tryon has honed so well in “The Other” and “Harvest Home,” an ugliness begins settling over Camp Friend- Indeed. The thin veneer that hides the young teen-ager from the savage that lies just under the surface begins peeling away. It’s the same gradual deterioration of civilized principles in “The Night of the Moonbow” that we associate with William Golding’s equally chilling “The Lord of the Flies.” Something terribly, terribly wrong is going to happen at Camp Friend-Indeed, and it’s the inevitability of this unknown that keeps us glued to the pages. The novel is a dual main selection of the Literary Guild.

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BLESSINGS by Belva Plain (Delacorte Press: $19.95; 352 pp.)

THE NIGHT OF THE MOONBOW by Thomas Tryon (Alfred A. Knopf: $18.95; 320 pp.)

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