Books: The Girl in the Gold Borsalino a Wider World: Portraits in an

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Kate Simon, best known as the author of guidebooks, is one of those rare writers who is preternaturally incapable of composing a dull sentence. Here, for example, are the pickings of a random sampling of her work. A description of a Canal Street flea market from New York Places and Pleasures: "Inside, a sizable jungle of loose white and tan shoelaces, Dracula banks which need batteries for pushing out a pale green hand to grasp a coin, among the books one volume of an obsolete encyclopedia and a novel by Clare Boothe Luce." From Mexico Places and Pleasures: "One young man in an exquisite hat and beautifully made dress keeps circulating among American women asking for a household job which would include cooking, cleaning, dress- and hat-making." And this priceless piece of advice from Italy: The Places In Between: "One assumes that foreign ladies, English and Americans particularly, because they are tremulous, neurotic bags of bone reduced by sexual malnutrition, find all Italians irresistible. Gentlemen who agree with this premise are often to be found in hotels during festa times when numerous visitors, to-ing and fro-ing at odd times, create a nice smorgasbord. Don Giovanni prowls the hallways, listening to accents and watching the sway of buttocks. He selects a recipient for his gifts and tracks her down to her door. He knocks and keeps knocking, asking for one small moment, pliss. If you've glanced at his wares and found them resistible, lock the door and don't answer. In time he will tire of your silly intransigence and go on to offer his golden moments at another door."

Similar bijoux abound in Simon's books about England and, of all places, the Bronx. The northernmost borough of New York City was the setting for the author's childhood, recounted with striking imagery and emotional precision in Bronx Primitive (1982). It too is a sort of travel book. A four-year-old Kate and her rachitic younger brother are transported thousands of miles from Poland to the U.S. at the end of World War I. The girl discovers the American air to be full of strange odors and foreign languages, especially English. She is part of a typical "Jewish immigrant hegira": first the densely packed tenements of the Lower East Side, later the wide open spaces of the Bronx, where her household is a turnstile of transient relatives. Simon's father plugs along in the shoe-design business and resents the energy and inquisitiveness of his wife and oldest daughter. Kate learns early that men can be a primary cause of pain and guilt.

Simon's sequel, A Wider World, begins on the day of her elementary-school graduation, a rite of passage that, she remembers tartly, called for "light rejoicing." Mother buys her a rose; Father gives her the withering news that she can go to high school for only one year of secretarial courses. The 13- year-old's response introduces the principal motif of the book, if not the dominant theme of her life: "Here I stand, hobbled in a sack of doom, determined to tear out of it, knowing that I will."