Four Past Midnight
Stephen King
If beginnings were all that counted in storytelling, Stephen
King would be pop fiction's most reliable entertainer. Every one of
the four tales in this hefty collection lifts off handily within the
first few pages. Unfortunately, stories also need middles and ends,
and in King's less-controlled yarns, the middles sag while the
endings often collapse into confused hysterics. With one fine
exception — ''The Sun Dog'' — these new novellas represent the prolific
King at his least royal. C+
The Plains of Passage
Jean M. Auel
In her
latest Ice Age saga — a series that began with The Clan of the Cave
Bear — Auel's tall, blond, omnicompetent heroine, Ayla, and her tall,
blond, Cro-Magnon boyfriend, Jondalar, travel across the grasslands
of the Ukraine to the west end of the Black Sea, then up the delta of
the Danube. Auel intercuts passages limited to Cro-Magnon points of
view with others that only someone up on the latest paleontology
could have written, such as treatises on how mammoths mate and
glaciers grow. B+
Buffalo Girls
Larry McMurtry
As their
world — the West — disappears, McMurtry's cowboys, Indians, mountain
men, and buffalo girls become, with few exceptions, chronically
depressed. Yet their stories and their talk are gallantly enjoyable.
When two disappointed beaver hunters ride into a desolate, abandoned
Wyoming town — ''It was a beautiful morning, not a cloud between them
and the Colorado'' — they experience an exhilarating feeling of
possibility that never entirely deserts them. The book is about hope
in the face of hopelessness. A
Rabbit at Rest
John Updike
The age of
families: the '50s. The age of psychopolitical voyages and
discoveries: the '60s. The age of oodles: the Reagan '80s. The waning
age: right now. These are the defining moments of John Updike's
Rabbit tetralogy, and with each volume the author has seemed more
determined to hold a mirror up to the age at hand. Spectacularly
readable, Rabbit at Rest is filled with news of contemporary life.
What's troubling is that in pursuing fun, the book seems to jettison
the search for understanding that animated the earlier Rabbits. B+
Coyote
Linda Barnes
In her third full-length
appearance, Linda Barnes' detective Carlotta Carlyle — former cop,
part-time cabbie — has come into her own and joined the small but
growing lineup (Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski, Sue Grafton's Kinsey
Millhone) of commanding, hard-boiled heroines. A-
There's a Country in My Cellar
Russell Baker
The muddled middle-class man, baffled by machinery, income tax forms,
the latest scientific pronouncement, and modern life in general — this
is the comic persona of New York Times writer Russell Baker. As this
collection of columns from the past 25 years makes clear, Baker may
be less solemn than the pundits who surround him, but he is also more
serious, more scathing, and more enduring. B+
