Books: Notable

STARTING OVER

by DAN WAKEFIELD

290 pages. Delacorte. $7.95.

Built-in obsolescence was one of the great ideas of the 1950s. For the sake of the G.N.P., it was better if appliances and autos did not last too long. Now, nostalgia notwithstanding, it appears that perhaps the youth of that period were not put together too well either. Phil Potter, 33, came of age in the 1950s, went into public relations and married a model. Five years later, he watches his marriage fall apart.

Like the nearly 2,000,000 Americans who get divorced each year, Potter then has to start over. He leaves Madison Avenue for a job teaching at a junior college in Boston. He also enters the desperate maze of the newly unmarried. There are those lonely meals off the refrigerator shelf and, in Potter's case, so much booze that it seems increasingly unlikely he will show up for the next chapter.

Of course, there are also the one-night stands, two-night stands, etc. One affair loses its bloom but turns into a spiky friendship that periodically takes the novel a little deeper into what it is like to search for dependable and comfortable companionship. The search F comes to its inevitable end with an old-is fashioned Southern girl who is, beneath | the honeyed exterior, as tough as pork a rind. Potter is last seen as a retread bridegroom.

Like so many journalists who have taken up popular-novel writing for a living, Wakefield seems content to stripmine emotions while being careful not to scratch motivations too deeply. Perhaps intentionally, he has planted in his novel its own most accurate assessment. A film-writer friend of Potter's shows him a script and Potter remarks: "It wasn't anything that would knock you out, and had its share of cliché ideas and situations, but it wasn't all bad, either."

OARS ACROSS THE PACIFIC

by JOHN FAIRFAX and SYLVIA COOK

255 pages. Norton. $6.95.

The lesson of this trip is that if God had really intended a young British adventurer and his nonswimming girl friend to row their way across the Pacific in a 42-ft. boat, he would have found a way to put oars on the human anatomy. For some reason, John Fairfax and Sylvia Cook failed to take that divine negative hint, and for nearly twelve months in 1970-71 they painfully bobbed and stroked from San Francisco to Hayman Island, just off Australia, a journey of 8,000 miles. This is a spare but colorful account of their voyage and the strange interlocked lives they shared aboard the cramped Britannia H (Fairfax crossed the Atlantic solo in No. 1). It is short on providing any serious rationale for the caper (from the inside of a small boat, after all, the Pacific is not merely there, it's sort of everywhere), probably because really there wasn't one.

Fairfax and Cook, who amicably announce at book's end that they plan to go separate ways in life, maintain that once afloat they were partners only in the seagoing sense. In truth, they seem far from natural thole mates, he a fearless blue-water Tarzan, she a slightly petrified British Jane. The result is lots of sitcom sparring (Fairfax: "Why don't you want to see a dead whale?"), which gets progressively less seaworthy after the tenth day out or so.

THE UNGODLY: A NOVEL OF THE DONNER PARTY

by RICHARD RHODES