Those Crazy Days of Summer

There was a time when with bloody fin and iron paw, a rabbit and a shark ran the top of the bestseller list, having wrested it from a mellow though relentless seabird. But the long, glorious summers of leisurely beach reading--”Watership Down,” “Jaws,” and “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” next to the pre-SPF tanning butter--have gone the way of eight-track tapes and the Friday afternoon wait for Daddy. Never again will millions have a whole summer to kill off all of Jacqueline Susann or even one book by Leon Uris.

Two decades ago the core beach reader--a housewife with children--was assumed to have nothing better to do than shade her eyes with glare-resistant pages during the long creep from Memorial Day to Labor Day. In winter you worried, in summer you tanned. Serious books left unattractive lines on crinkled foreheads. It was paradoxical, then, that in the unsettled era when the “Female Eunuch” and “Joy of Sex” were also closely studied, the doorstop-sized escapist paperback--”The Exorcist,” “Once is Not Enough,” “The Winds of War”--did best.

Today you go to the beach to jog, then turn around and catch up on paperwork. An overcast day is devoted to the gym instead of 200 pages of Irving Wallace.

Still, can summer reading really be just a memory? Well, no, but it’s not what it used to be either. This season there’s no lack of sandy, overstuffed reads: Belva Plain’s “Whispers,” Nora Roberts’ “Private Scandals,” Barbara Taylor Bradford’s “Angel” and Cynthia Blair’s “Temptation.” And what Variety calls “actioners,” for manly men: Jack Higgins’ “Thunder Point,” Stephen Coonts’ “The Red Horseman” and techno-meister Tom Clancy’s “Without Remorse.” Can you not see Dominick Dunne’s “A Season in Purgatory” next to the ice tea of the socially ambitious at poolside? Each book strives for at least the mythic 100,000-copy first printing (Clancy’s is 12 times that size), has been selected by a book club and will one day be a major motion picture--or at least a four-part miniseries.

But intellectually more ambitious works are muscling in. The idea of a summer publication for T. C. Boyle’s “The Road to Wellville,” a satiric novel of early 20th-Century diet faddists, or “Pigs in Heaven,” Barbara Kingsolver’s novel about a psychologically abused native-American child caught in a custody battle, in the old days would have gotten a junior editor busted down to the typing pool. The pool has evaporated--people do their own typing now--and summer is no longer a separate state of mind.

There’s a noteworthy lack of idyllic locales in these books (I don’t count movie studios, talk-show sets or the worldwide corporate headquarters of high-powered fashion companies as vacation destinations). First-time novelist Cynthia Blair has an MBA for God’s sake--what could she know about time off? Her protagonist is an ambitious free-lance writer. Nora Roberts has written 91 novels in 13 years, so she could hardly give her characters nothing to do: They are cutthroat afternoon talk-show hosts. Peter Benchley’s “Jaws,” set in sleepy Amity was probably the fastest-selling summer read of all time, moving 7,000,000 paperbacks in 1974--more than twice what the big books sell today. But if “Jaws” were being written today, you’d have the mayor in league with the shark--just a fish scarfing up swimmers wouldn’t be enough excitement any more.

Zeitgeist-surfing is the round-up writer’s best friend. And boy, how times have changed. Our modern-day James Bond, Clancy’s Jack Ryan, takes a break in the midst of Armageddon to call his wife. And remember the famous mentholized lovemaking from “The Other Side of Midnight,” by which Noelle reduces Armand Gautier to putty? Well, look at this stallion-and-mare scene from “Angel”: “Grasping hold of his shoulders, she whispered hoarsely, ‘Please, Kevin, get undressed and come to bed. I want to feel you inside me.’ ” That’s OK; the beach read picked up early on the woman as insatiable lover. But read on: “Stretching out on the bed next to her, he took her in his arms, murmuring her name, nuzzling her neck. But after a moment or two he rolled over to his side, groped in the drawer of the bedside table for. . .” Uh, oh, a condom--more effective than carbon dating to tell you when a book was written.

Trashy reads leave no paper trail--unless you’ve kept them on your shelf, there’s no place you can go to study the likes of “Fire Island” or “Beaches” under glass. Libraries sell last year’s most asked-for book for a quarter, and they’re lucky to get it. Continuity is instead provided by the authors themselves; once writers make the inner circle of the bestseller club and keep producing, they get a pretty long run. James Clavell published “Shogun” in 1975; this year a sequel, “Gai-Jin,” comes along. Sheldon has endured through more than two decades, the only change being that the long descriptive passages of his early work have given way to the three rules of modern pulp novel-writing: dialogue, dialogue and dialogue. The prologue to “The Other Side of Midnight” (1974) weighed in at 3,500 words; 1987’s “Windmill of the Gods” at 350, most in quotes, including this economical exchange at a secret intelligence conference:

“Frey?”

“Yes.”

“Sigmund?”

“ Nein . The danger--”

“Thor?”

“Yes.”

“Tyr?”

“Yes.”

“I vote yes. The resolution is passed.”

There’s even a new James Bond book, although not of course by Ian Fleming. John Gardner brings back the British hero for the 11th time in “Never Send Flowers,” to do battle against . . . a serial killer? This is the awkward nemesis of choice for thriller writers, now that the KGB and the Stasi are gone (not much use for the exploding lighter anymore, either). But if Bond vs. Serial Killer is evidence time marches on, what about the fact that while his movie double lately has felt nothing but avuncular feelings for his female associates, the literary Bond still does certain things the old-fashioned, not-quite-grammatical way: “As he entered her, she let out a little cry of pleasure, rough at the back of her throat.” Safe sex is not for 007. No jokes about licenses to kill, please.

So where to turn amid the confusion? With the VCR permanently unprogrammable, the Fox Network trying to make a bid for quality and four-letter words appearing in the New Yorker, these times demand a sure thing. Well, Michael Crichton had summer bestsellers 20 years ago and he’s got two now (“Jurassic Park” and “Rising Sun”). I say stick with what you know. Try “Jurassic Park”--you’ll love it even if ‘70s beach reading left you with the skin of a velociraptor.

A SUMMER READING SAMPLER

May / Just Published

A Season in Purgatory by Dominick Dunne (Crown)

Angel by Barbara Taylor Bradford (Random House)

I’ll Be Seeing You by Mary Higgins Clark (Simon & Schuster)

Paper Doll by Robert B. Parker (Putnam)

Throat by Peter Straub (Dutton)

Whispers by Belva Plain (Delacorte)

Flavor of the Month by Olivia Goldsmith (Simon & Schuster)

Never Send Flowers by John Gardner (Putnam)

Temptation by Cynthia Blair (Ballantine)

June

Pleading Guilty by Scott Turow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Gai-Jin by James Clavell (Delacorte)

Thunder Point by Jack Higgins (Putnam)

The Red Horseman by Stephen Coonts (Pocket Books)

July

The Night Manager by John LeCarre (Alfred A. Knopf)

Violent Ward by Len Deighton (HarperCollins)

Honor Among Thieves by Jeffrey Archer (Harpercollins)

The Forbidden Zone by Whitley Strieber (Dutton)

Hill Towns by Anne Rivers Siddons (HarperCollins)

Homeland by John Jakes (Doubleday)

Private Scandals by Nora Roberts (Putnam)

August

Without Remorse by Tom Clancy (Putnam)

After All These Years by Susan Isaacs (HarperCollins)

Vanished by Danielle Steel (Delacorte)

Mischief by Ed McBain (William Morrow)