Bookends: Apr. 11, 1988

THE HEARTS AND LIVES OF MEN

by Fay Weldon

Viking; 357 pages; $18.95

For her twelfth novel, British Author and Playwright Fay Weldon has taken a giddy leap back to the fiction style of the 19th century. Enough of angst and ambiguity, of literary experiment. Bring on Trollope's nudging narrator and Dickens' moral confidence. The Hearts and Lives of Men -- surely a Victorian novelist would have come up with a livelier title -- is nonetheless set in modern times, specifically the fast-track London art world of the '60s and '70s. It covers 23 years in the lives of Clifford and Helen Wexford, an attractive, careless pair who marry, remarry, have messy affairs, manage to lose track of their little girl for a 14-year span -- and still retain the reader's sympathy. Perhaps because the author is a longtime feminist, Helen, who finally conquers her passive instincts and makes an independent life for herself, comes off rather better than her domineering, pigheaded husband.

But Weldon is more interested in cleverness than character. Her gabby narrator, a woman in the Wexfords' social circle, buckets along, throwing motivation and consistency to the winds in favor of little epigrams and bitchy asides ("She looked like a Christmas cracker with no present inside"). Weldon even produced this flighty nonsense the old-fashioned way: in weekly installments for the British magazine Woman. The Hearts and Lives of Men will make superior feminist beach reading.

THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY

by Edmund White

Knopf; 228 pages; $17.95

In his 1982 semimemoir, A Boy's Own Story, Edmund White came as close as anyone has to producing the Great American Gay Novel. Its depiction of sexual awakening was vividly specific, yet its emotional terrain -- initial delight leading to guilt and alarm at the strange new force in one's life -- might have evoked adolescence for almost any reader. The Beautiful Room Is Empty, a sequel that takes White into young manhood, is at once clumsier and much more ambitious. At times as pretentious as the title, derived from Kafka, it trots out a succession of irritatingly self-indulgent characters and a clutch of cliches about the 1950s, from the bohemian belle to the poet turned adman. Yet White can always save a wearying passage with some apercu about himself or some chillingly uninflected glimpse of cruelty. And if his protracted tale about coming out seems dated, that merely reflects White's master plan: he aims at nothing less than a social history of emerging gay consciousness from the suppressed 1950s through the '60s. In the era of AIDS, White's novel is a fiercely remembered plea not to push gays back into the closet.

NOTHING TO DECLARE

by Mary Morris

Houghton Mifflin; 250 pages; $18.95