If you can`t get away on vacation this summer because all your extra cash is earmarked for VISA, a new roof or little Tiffany`s braces, and you`re weary of hearing Robin Leach prate on about the exotic hideaways of the rich and famous, it`s good to know that affordable escapes are as close as your nearest bookstore.
For less than $20, the current crop of novelists will transport you to the antebellum plantation houses of New Orleans, the jungles of Vietnam, the streets of London, the Libyan desert or the set of a top TV morning show in Manhattan-and you won`t even have to update your passport.
By far the most accomplished tour guide of the lot is Eileen Goudge. Her first novel, Garden of Lies (Viking, $19.95), already has attracted extravagant attention. Goudge, who is distantly related to the late Elizabeth Goudge of ”Green Dolphin Street” fame, received nearly a million dollars for her hardback debut, which is slotted for a miniseries on ABC. And in the case of ”Garden of Lies,” all the publicity is much ado about something pretty terrific.
The notion of infants switched is a literary device both antique and overused, but in Goudge`s skillful hands it becomes fresh and credible. It`s summer, 1943. Sylvie Rosenthal is in the maternity ward of a hospital somewhere in the Bronx, and she has a seemingly insoluble problem. The infant daughter she`s just delivered looks not like her placid, fair-haired husband, Gerald, but like her Greek handyman-lover, Nikos.
Terrified that her wealthy, indulgent husband will divorce her if he discovers her adultery, Sylvie takes desperate measures. Confusion following a fire in the hospital permits her to exchange her own dusky baby for a blond one newly orphaned by the accident.
Sylvie`s real daughter is named Rose and is raised by the Santinis, the family of the dead woman; Sylvie calls her surrogate child Rachel. Her guilt about what she has done leads Sylvie to smother Rachel with affection.
Goudge traces the lives of the two young women with considerable narrative skill and insight. Rose`s early years are spent caring for her invalid grandmother. Once the old lady is dead and Rose`s fiance, Brian, is far away in Vietnam, she`s free to pursue her dream of becoming a lawyer. Rachel chooses medical school and ends up in Vietnam, where the fates of the two women (and the fate of Brian) curiously and painfully converge in an army field hospital.
Tying up the loose ends of such a plot might result in a bundle of cliches. Instead, Goudge delivers a satisfying, heartlifting resolution.
The loyal, sweet-natured military wife was a stock character in the films of the `40s and `50s. Kate Coscarelli, author of ”Fame and Fortune” and
”Perfect Order,” puts some spin on the stereotype with Pretty Women (NAL, $18.95), an engaging novel about Air Force wives with minds and personalities all their own.
Coscarelli focuses on a trio of spirited young women who find themselves stationed at a remote air base in Tripoli, Libya in 1952. Fellow rebels Tess Kipling, Samara Silverman Mulhare and Chili Shaheen gravitate toward one another immediately. Boredom, loneliness and duty-free alcohol abound;
extramarital affairs are an inevitable consequence.
Chili is pressured into an ugly liason with the brutal base commander, Brick Masters. When she`s found dead of a gunshot wound in the head, apparently a suicide, key people are transferred and a cover-up follows.
Fast forward 20 years. Tess, now the dean of women at a California university, and Sam, head of her father`s motion picture studio, get letters from a long-forgotten friend from the Tripoli days. Her information forces Tess and Sam to question the circumstances of Chili`s death.
Coscarelli`s prose takes on a purple tinge the minute a couple hits the sheets, but ”Pretty Women” is a brisk, intelligent read. The Tripoli sequences ring true (Coscarelli herself was a young Air Force wife in Libya), and the author isn`t afraid to take a moral stand, a refreshing quality in these times and in this genre.
Janice Kaplan`s A Morning Affair (NAL, $18.95) is an upclose and personal look at the female correspondent of a morning news show. Young, gorgeous, bright and on the rise, Jackie Rogers is a little bit Maria Shriver, Joan Lunden and Jane Pauley and a little bit rock `n` roll. After asking a particularly shrewd question at a Washington press conference, she`s tapped for the big time-”AM Reports,” a crack-of-dawn network television show.
There are some amusing bits when Jackie discovers her job has less to do with hard news than it does with fashion shows-we`re reminded of anchor Christine Craft`s similar epiphany. Even so, Jackie is thrilled to be on the small screen at all.
Then, on her third day in New York, Jackie meets Julian Beardsley, an attractive and powerful broker. The next night finds them in bed. Then there`s Jeff Garth, Jackie`s tall and muscled producer. What`s a girl to do?
Jackie also finds herself competing ferociously for the co-anchor spot with her new friend Dominique, the show`s entertainment reporter. So Jackie has decisions to make-about the cost of ambition, the order of her priorities and where her true loyalties lie. Kaplan was a producer of ”Good Morning America” and obviously knows whereof she speaks.
Rising American pop star Karen Wells, heroine of Sally Mandel`s A Time to Sing (McGraw-Hill, $18.95), knows what success feels like: ”She had stood on that stage . . . and stared out at acres of people on their feet, screaming, stamping, howling for more.” Edward Vaughan, writer and professor of literature at Columbia University, understands what the beginning of a downward slide feels like.
When the songbird and the washed-up, British-born scribe get stuck in an elevator, they feel a mutual attraction. Despite the disparity in their backgrounds and lifestyles, they are happy for a while.
But Edward has grown so thin. And he gets a lot of colds. And sometimes, in bed, he`s just too tired. The lovers must face the truth. Edward has cancer.
Mandel wisely sets this weepy story against the brassy vitality of the New York and London music scenes, a poignant counterpoint to Edward`s failing health and Karen`s tenderness as she cares for him. If you`re in the mood for a summer sob, this may be your book.
Jennifer Blake`s Love and Smoke (Fawcett Columbine, $17.95) is a New Orleans saga that concerns itself with the kind of social, sexual and political intrigues that seem peculiarly Southern.
Blake has had a phenomenally successful career as an author of paperback romances-”Perfume of Paradise” and ”Surrender in Moonlight” are typical titles-and she now follows her counterparts, Danielle Steel and Janet Dailey, into the hardback world. Not surprisingly, Blake`s style is as steamy as a still July night on the bayou, as overwhelmingly hot as Cajun spice.
Meet Riva Staulet, a woman so impossibly beautiful and so formidable that she makes your teeth ache. (If ”Love and Smoke” becomes a movie, Faye Dunaway would make a swell Riva. Tallulah Bankhead, in her prime, would have been better still.)
In any case, Blake has supplied the gorgeous but pushy Riva a life that would give Scarlett O`Hara the vapors. Born Rebecca Benson, the youngest of three daughters of a poor widow with a heart condition, Riva is only 15 when she meets Edison Gallant, the man who will change her life and become her nemesis.
An ambitious, cruel Tulane law student, Gallant begins by seducing and impregnating Riva`s older sister, Beth. After Beth bleeds to death as the result of a self-induced abortion, the improbably named Gallant rapes young Riva-on the way home from her sister`s funeral. The charmer`s winning ways continue: he pretends to marry Riva, uses her sexually for a month, then announces he`s already married and disappears.
When Riva next sees Gallant, 25 years later, she is an incredibly wealthy widow, the mistress of Bonne Vie plantation. He is running for governor of Louisiana. Need I say more?
Riva sees her opportunity to fry Gallant`s chitlins once and for all. She does it, too, but you`ll have to find out how by yourselves. I have to loosen my stays and lie down in a dark, cool room for a spell.
