Waller’s Third Time Is Less Than Charming to Critics

Every so often comes a book that generates such wickedly awful reviews that reading one more is like slowing down to watch another car slam into a pileup.

Such is the critics’ response to “Border Music,” the new novel by Robert James Waller, author of the mega-selling “The Bridges of Madison County” and “Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend.”

Waller “has fed his hackneyed romance recipe back into the computer and come up with his worst book yet, a truly atrocious ballad about a part-time cowboy and a onetime topless dancer that gives new meaning to the words sappy, sexist, mannered and cliched ,” Michiko Kakutani said in the lead sentence of her New York Times review.

“The book is not unreadable,” wrote Deirdre Donahue in USA Today. “But Waller’s homespun cliches about the road and freedom and not being tied down to an icky job with a pension get so cloying that the reader eventually wants to shout, ‘Oh go home and count your own money, Mr. Big Bucks Writer.’ ”

Walter Kirn, in New York magazine, labeled Waller “a Wal-Mart troubadour, a denim Liberace.”

In Entertainment Weekly’s review, which gave “Border Music” an F for failure, Vanessa V. Friedman called the book “the literary equivalent of a velvet Elvis painting, from its synthetic story line to its connect-the-dots characters.”

It would be cruel to reprise these reviews if Waller were not a titan of commercial fiction. The truth is, the reviews don’t matter. Readers have already voted with their charge cards.

“Border Music” will debut Sunday on the New York Times’ national bestseller list at No. 3. It was the top-selling fiction hardcover last week in the Waldenbooks chain. Warner Books had an initial printing of 1.2 million copies--and recent reorders should prompt a second volley of 300,000 copies.

Numbers like these are ho-hum to Waller, whose two previous romances have sold more than 10 million books, generating enough bucks to turn a cowboy into a rancher. “The Bridges of Madison County” has spent 132 weeks on the New York Times’ national bestseller list--and the movie version, which stars Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep, should spur even more sales when it arrives in the summer.

“If you look at John Grisham, Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins, Sidney Sheldon and others, you’ll see that they all caught on with audiences despite some harsh reviews,” said Laurence J. Kirshbaum, the president of Warner Books. “The great weakness in book reviewing today is the inability to say, ‘It’s a commercial book, but it’s a good commercial book.’ ”

The Denver Post suggested as much by running a locally written rave for “Border Music” along with Kakutani’s evisceration. Adrienne A. Bendel, a director with Medical Group Management Assn., wrote that Waller fans would warm to his two main characters “because they allow us to indulge our fantasies of cruising the open road and living life as it comes without weighing the consequences.”

Kirshbaum and others in the industry have noticed that some of the critical poundings were published days before the book reached stores on Feb. 7--the kind of preemptive judgment more common to news-making nonfiction.

“I think there was an element of getting back at this Waller phenomenon,” Kirshbaum suggested.

He added: “I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t hurt. It does hurt. On the other hand, I’m realistic enough to know that word-of-mouth on a book is far more powerful.”

And Waller? “He’s stoic about it,” Kirshbaum said. “He feels that ‘Border Music’ is one of his best books. He said last week that he’ll accept the verdict of the readers.”

On the Racks: It may come as a relief to those who have tired of O. J. mania that the famous murder trial means little to editors outside of what the World Press Review calls “the Western journalistic mainstream.” In its February issue, the Review runs down the Top 10 stories of 1994, as determined by editors who work in developing countries and by others who edit publications that cover the Third World. Among their choices were the election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, the strife in Bosnia and the violence in Rwanda. No O. J.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press’ survey of editors in the United States found O. J. Simpson to be last year’s biggest story, followed by the November elections, the baseball and hockey labor troubles, the Susan Smith murder case and the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding incident. An international story--Haiti--placed No. 6. “In the end, there is no sure cure for cultural myopia,” senior editor Barry Shelby writes. “But if we live in the ‘global village,’ we should, at the very least, listen to what our neighbors are saying.”

* Paul D. Colford’s column is published Fridays.