Books: Bookends People Like Us

The good Lord must love the nouveaux riches, because he made so many of them. He also seems to have provided a surfeit of writers to turn their freshly gilded lives into trashy novels. Among recent scribes who specialize in pressing readers' noses against the glass that separates them from the best of everything is Dominick Dunne (The Two Mrs. Grenvilles). His latest is sodden with the sort of unimaginative stock characters that have tumbled out of all the rich-and-famous pseudo fiction of the 1980s. The setting is Manhattan's Upper East Side, the pricey arena where old-moneyed families quietly count their fortunes in the millions and the newly minted are loudly working on their second billion. Crass vs. class, with the usual results: money goes far but only so far. Characters suffer fates made familiar by recent headlines and gossip columnists: a coarse financial tycoon rises and then falls in an insider-trading scandal; a TV newsman married to an aristocrat grows bored and casts off for another port; the homosexual son of one of the town's most respected families gets AIDS.

Dunne tries to dazzle with expensive brand names and superficial sociology. He deals in story threads, not plot lines. One is about revenging the murder of a young woman reminiscent of Dunne's own daughter, Actress Dominique Dunne, who was killed by her former boyfriend in 1982. A new low in exploitation.

THE PIGEON

by Patrick Suskind

Translated by John E. Woods

Knopf; 115 pages; $14.95

Jonathan Noel, 53, has been a bank guard in Paris for some 30 years. He imagines that by the time he retires, he will "assuredly be the one person in all Paris -- perhaps even in all France -- who had stood the longest time in just one place." This suits Jonathan fine. His childhood was disagreeably eventful: both parents disappeared during World War II. As a young man, he was pressured into the army and then into an unsuitable, short-lived marriage. Since then, he has carefully constructed a hermetic existence designed to protect himself from all surprises. His plan works, until the morning he discovers a pigeon staring at him in the hallway outside his attic room. The protagonist of German Author Patrick Suskind's second novel seems as commonplace as the monstrous main character of his first, the international best seller Perfume (1986), was bizarre. Such appearances are deceiving. The Pigeon is a small, unassuming paradigm of psychological terror and comedy. With remarkable grace and compression, Suskind displays a life, dismantles it and then puts it all back together again.

AN OUTDOOR JOURNAL

by Jimmy Carter

Bantam; 275 pages; $18.95