Books: Summer Reading

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ALASKA

by James A. Michener

Random House; 868 pages; $22.50

Unhook the phone! Sling the hammock!

Cast off all brunches! Alaska, James A. Michener's latest titanic adventure novel, promises to transport vacationing readers through billions of years and thousands of scenic miles. The Michener word factory can always be counted on to produce an August fact-pack, and Alaska represents the state of this honorable craft. This mother lode of incident and peril begins with woolly mammoths and the Stone Age Athapascans who crossed the straits from Siberia some 29,000 years ago and ends with daring 1980s bush pilots who bring basketball backboards and lawyers to oil-rich Eskimos in the wilderness. Besides multiple heroes and heroines, there are knaves and opportunists who have depleted Alaska's resources and contributed to the high rates of alcoholism and suicide. One of Michener's favorite words is noble, but after mushing through his Arctic saga of persistence and greed, one is not surprised that he uses it mainly to describe grizzly bears, salmon and whales.

A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON

by Muriel Spark

Houghton Mifflin; 189 pages; $17.95

There is usually a point in a Muriel Spark novel where the reader realizes that what has seemed as blithe and airy as a minuet is also a struggle for mortal stakes. In A Far Cry from Kensington it is when Spark's beguiling narrator, Mrs. Hawkins, a fat young widow who is an editor in a publishing house, explains her uncontrollable penchant for blurting out costly truths: "It feels like preaching the gospel." Her penetrating innocence is pitted against the corruption of the hack writer and phony spiritualist Hector Bartlett, whose machinations pervade her working life and even the boardinghouse where she lives. Spark's setting -- London's genteel bohemian neighborhoods during the threadbare years after World War II -- is precisely and lovingly evoked. Among a host of vivid minor characters, one successful novelist could stand for the author: "She had wit, on some occasions magic." This, for Spark, is one of those occasions.

WHERE I'M CALLING FROM

by Raymond Carver

Atlantic Monthly Press

391 pages; $19.95