The Press Democrat du lieu suivant : Santa Rosa, California • 63

C5 Books An American manifesto A dumped wife SPLITTING By Fay Weldon Atlantic Monthly Press; $21 THI PRESS DEMOCRAT, SUNDAY, JULY 0, 1 D9S THE NEXT AMERICAN NATION: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution By Michael Lind The Free Press; $25 I 71 MAHKQERSON 4L "7 Fay Weldon's new book, is a novel about divorce and the fine art of revenge. TIM BRINTON By CAROLYN SEE Fay Weldon Is a novelist, of course, but she's more than that. Her books should be sold at drugstores near feminine products. Her work is "literary," sure, but she's a tonic besides. She's the very best medicine for a soggy divorced woman.

Her words are like alum: bitter, tightening, acerbic, astringent. A soggy person reading this might not cheer up it's next to impossible to cheer up a dumped wife but Weldon can blot up the moisture, and that's a start. "Splitting" Is another novel about divorce, getting booted out and the fine art of revenge. It's a fantasy, of course, because dumped wives rarely get the revenge they dream about, but sometimes a fantasy can be helpful. Why not take this position, Weldon suggests to her hypothetical soggy reader.

Why not take the position that somewhere, buried beneath the forever-weeping, almost fatally injured, utterly passive victim you are now, other "selves" may be lurking, dozing, lying in wait? Maybe they can help you now. There's the woman you were before you were married. And there's the practical, deceitful girl who knows how to scratch out a living when she has to. And there has to be a party doll in there someplace who cares only for heedless pleasure. (Heedless pleasure! If you're getting dumped, nothing seems more impossible to latch onto than heedless pleasure.

But if you can, it certainly helps. This is a novel that's hard to write about because the premise is the plot. Nevertheless, it must be said that in the quaint English town of Barley, a spunky, pretty young woman named Angelica sings in a rock band and has a hit song at the top of the charts for eight weeks. This brings her a little more than 800,000 pounds by the time she's only 19. Not because of money but because of the mysterious power of love, Angelica marries Sir Edwin Rice, younger son of the local landed gentry.

Angelica, now Lady Rice, turns over her 800,000 pounds to the Rice Estate and devotes the next 11 years to being the best wife she can. She organizes the Rice manor house, she gives interminable dinner parties, she laughs at Edwin's bad jokes. (She draws the line at having kids, and it's just as well.) Inevitably, Edwin tires of her, and who can blame him? Lady Rice is a dull sort of person, quite different from the headstrong Angelica he married. Lady Rice is a By RICHARD BERNSTEIN Excepting the immodest few who run for top public office, not many observers of the passing scene would have the audacity to present their ideas for the collective American future as a "manifesto." It is a measure of his boldness that Michael Lind does just that. "The Next American Nation," he writes, is "the first manifesto of American liberal nationalism," which, in essence, is a prescription for prosperity and justice based on what Lind calls "cultural fusion and genetic amalgamation not just of white immigrant groups but of Americans of all races." Moreover, he writes, only liberal nationalism, by contrast with other, either liberal or conservative counter-manifestoes, "can lead to an America in which you and your descendants would want to live." If you say that yours is the only way to a radiant future, you'd better be good.

Fortunately, Lind is very good. "The Next American Nation" is a brash, refreshingly unorthodox, always interesting performance by a young man (he is just 32) who defies the usual political categories of left and right, liberal and conservative. This is not to say that Lind's book is always compelling or even that it is convincing more than half of the time. It is often both tendentious and dreamy, based too much on pure thought and not enough on any experience with the way the world actually works. Just about every element of LInd's description of the current national plight and in his prescriptions for the future is debatable.

Still, even when he is Utopian or dogmatic, Lind saves himself by his obvious intelligence. His book is one of the best certainly it is the most visionary, the most forward-looking in the growing library of works on the American identity, multict 1-turalism and the future. "The Next American Nation" is organized around what might be called two disavowals. The first concerns the dominant vogue of multiculturalism, which Lind treats as an unmitigated calamity. He is an enemy of racial preferences, affirmative action and racial labeling, the elimination of which he cites as liberal nationalism's "one nonnegotiable demand." The second disavowal is of what Lind variously calls "the plutocracy," the "white overclass," the "oligarchy," which, he argues, has throughout American history struck a series of grand compromises, all of them aimed at maintaining its ascen- loathed, detested, almost ex-wife -the caste we have in the Western world that most closely corresponds to Indian "untouchables." But Weldon's heroine's name contains some other identities.

Angelica herself is still hanging on, but she's become anxious, fretful, paranoid. Lady Rice can only lie in bed and sob, nourishing herself on a divorcee's bitter tears. But there's Jelly as well (one of Angelica's childhood nicknames), who has the wit, in the midst of disaster, to brush up on her computer skills and the audacity to get a job working for her husband's attorney, so that she can keep abreast of the divorce from behind enemy lines. Luckily Edwin has forgotten to cancel one of her credit cards, so it's Jelly who checks into a luxury hotel and lives off her husband, then fiddles with the computer at the office so that no one notices the bills she runs up. There's another identity lurking inside Lady Rice, a person she hardly knows about since she was a virgin when she married.

Angel is the part of Lady Rice that buys slutty underwear and moseys on down to the hotel bar to pick up whatever guys she can find. (It doesn't even have to be guys.) Angel needs sex; that's the long and short of it. She scandalizes Lady Rice, Jelly and Angelica, but she cheers them up too. Once these characters are put into play, Weldon stands back and lets the divorce play out. Weldon has told this story before and doubtless will again.

But that's OK. The world will never suffer a shortage of soggy wives to read this stuff, and reading it, they will surely stiffen up. That's a good thing. Carolyn See reviews books for the Washington Post. lic rather than the world's most prosperous and socially mobile democracy.

Multicultural America is, he says, "plutocracy tempered by tokenism," which is a fine turn of phrase, but it does not disguise the author's approach, which could be called overstatement tempered by intelligence. His notion that affirmative action represents a kind of invisible hand of oligarchic power has an old-left pamphleteer's ring to it, but is it true? Lind, to take one of many possible examples, calls "our castelike educational system" the "final redoubt of oligarchy." His critique of preferences for the sons and daughters of alumni as affirmative action for the rich is compelling. But in 1993, the entering class at Harvard was more than 50 percent Jewish, Asian, black and Hispanic, while at Stanford, Berkeley and many other places those figures were even higher. Something more far-reaching than token gestures by the white overclass seems to be involved. Lind's specific proposals for the future demonstrate the same blend of boldness and dubiousness as does much of his analysis.

On the one hand, he brilliantly describes the elements of a common American culture. On the other, he lays out a vast government program involving an "unsubtle, crude, old-fashioned redistribution of wealth, through taxation and public spending." Still, despite its weaknesses and implau-sibilites, "The Next American Nation" deserves the appellation that Lind, a bit immodestly, gave it. It is a manifesto, and it deserves serious thought. Richard Bernstein reviews books for the New York Times. dancy in American life.

His analysis is unabashedly based on economic interest with little room left for other factors, such as idealism or principle. In the first American Republic, the "Anglo-American nation," the compromise was between North and South to keep blacks in bondage. The Second American Republic, what Lind calls "Euro-America," saw the bargain struck between the oligar-cy and the white working class to keep blacks out. This leads to Lind's highly critical portrayal of multiculturalism, which he declares "a repellent and failed regime," though not for the reasons normally cited by the critics of such things as racial preferences and the cult of ethnic and sexual authenticity. Conservatives have warned that these practices will lead to separatism, lowered standards and balkanization.

Lind avers, by contrast, that multiculturalism has become the basis for a new grand and highly conservative compromise. The white overclass has used racial labeling to buy supremacy by co-opting token numbers of blacks and other minority group members and giving them over-class status, leaving the vast majority untouched and unhelped. The real danger, Lind argues, is not Balkanization but Brazilianization, "a hightech feudal anarchy, featuring an archipelago of privileged whites in an ocean of white, black, and brown poverty." Throughout much of this, Lind, swept up perhaps in the grandeur of his vision, engages in overblown descriptions of the national plight, his constant use of such words as "plutocracy" and "reactionary" summoning up images of a banana repub BOOK BRIEFS devices as a pen or a Ouija-board planchette. Special Delivery. By Beckl and Keith Dilley with Sam Stall.

(Random House, $21.) Beckl and Keith Dilley's "Special Delivery" is an enthusiastic, somewhat bubble-gummy, account of how it feels to be raising America's only sextuplets. "Wow, that's a lot of diapers," and "Gee, Beckl and Keith must be tired" are about the most profound thoughts most readers will extract from this particular story. However, that is the type of book it is sweet, slight and fairly well-written a book to be finished in a few sittings. When Becki and Keith, who were plagued by Infertility, tried a drug called Pergonal, they were prepared to have twins or possibly triplets. Surprise.

A large portion of "Special Delivery" is spent on Becki's tortuous pregnancy, which was in many ways a race against the clock, since every second a fetus spends in utero gives It a higher chance for survival, yet the human body is not meant to carry sextuplets and will inevita bly exhaust its resources. Parenting sextuplets seems almost as tricky as delivering them. In spite of the many items donated from various sources, Beckl and Keith have experienced terrible financial troubles as well as practical difficulties. Their cheerful description of a typical outing with six toddlers sounds like a logistic nightmare. "Special Delivery" is ultimately about the joy the Dilley's have received from their children.

It is a fun and optimistic book. Los Angeles Times Milton, even Homer. Lord Byron was a follower and practitioner. Conan Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates, for heaven's sake. First-rate but flawed were Jack London (racist), Hemingway (pretentious), Mailer (ingenuous).

A.J. Liebling and Red Smith were simply the best, with Schulberg right behind. The author of "The Disenchanted" and "On the Waterfront" fell quite naturally into the rhythm of the ring. Bringing expertise and em- pathy to this col ls lection of es says, Schulberg swings from the high drama of the Marciano-Moore title fight, at once savage and cerebral, to the unspeakable Schulberg Women Who Write. By Lucinda Irwin Smith.

(Julian Messner, $15.) Women writers who are just beginning to learn their craft will benefit most from Lucinda Irwin Smith's collection of short, energetic interviews. Every possible format, from poetry to different types of fiction, journalism, plays and screenwriting is represented, along with a gratifying mix of ages, personal styles and ethnic groups. Many of Smith's questions are the nuts and bolts variety "Describe your writing environment," "What is the most important advice you offer young writers?" "Are you disciplined with your writing?" These questions can be frustrating. Ultimately, it is irrelevant whether a writer as brilliant as Margaret Atwood "keeps little notes." It might have been more revealing to see how she perceives her work in the larger context of feminist writing, or what role she thinks stories play in today's culture. Among Smith's strongest interviews are mystery writer Sue Grafton and poet and performance artist Cheryl Marie Wade.

Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game. By Budd Schulberg, (Ivan R. Dee, $25.) Nobody is neutral. Either you love boxing or you hate it Either it's the most elemental and ennobling of contests or it's the cruelest sport Budd Schulberg leaves no doubt as to his camp, citing a "simple, Indomitable fighting animal ferocious and capable in there alone with only the speed and force of his fisted hands, the durability of his jaw and ribs plus the decisive intangibles, character, intelligence, pride, spirit only these for weapons." More than any other sport, prize-righting has seduced the major writers of their time, back to ear. Noel Coward, Henry Fonda and Casey Tibbs, champion bronc-bust-er, registered on the same night Dropping names is a chancy craft, risking boredom, pretension or both; if you're going to do it, do it right, writes Herb Caen in a celebratory foreword.

Conrad knows when to hold 'em and knows when to fold 'em. He ought to. Author and artist of note, bullfighter of a more languorous but no less demanding era, founder of the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference, he knows everybody. Like an old friend catching up on old times, Conrad has a yarn for each, most of them funny, some twice-told, some unprintable, some poignant: Why John Steinbeck wanted to be reincarnated as a chocolate-flavored bug; when David Niv-en, skiing, got frostbite you-know-where and what he did about it; Capote's feud with Brando; the time Orson Welles fought a bull accidentally and the time Gary Cooper fought one on purpose. An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural.

By James Ran-dL(St Martin's, $2185.) The author is a scourge of charlatans who has won a MacArthur "genius" award for his work. Among Randi's talents is an ability to deflate the practitioners of the occult in understated prose. The mustachioed Russian mystic Gurdjieff, he writes, "has managed to command continued respect well after one of his frequent automobile crashes led to his premature demise in 1949." Randi debunks the Ouija board by noting that "the movement (of the plan-chette) is due to the ideomotor effect and this can be shown by the fact that when the operator is properly blindfolded, only gibberish is produced." Another entry explains what the "ideomotor effect" is: the unconscious movement of one's hand while gripping or touching such The Official Guide and Schedule of Events for the Sonoma County Fair is coming in The Press Democrat on Friday, July 14th. You'll find everything you need for a great time race horses to the Hall of Flowers, hot dogs to headliners with maps, coupons and the complete schedule of all the Fair's activities. tragedy of Speedy Sencio, battered into jelly because of a manager's greed and now a blind attendant in a men's room.

He recognizes the need for reform (but never abolition) while savoring the classic bout, "epic in form and mythic In content" Besides, he notes, "if our civilization is indeed declining and if it finally falls, it will not be because Joe Louis clobbered Max Schmeling or took the measure of Billy Conn." Name Dropping: Tales From My Barbary Coast Saloon. By Barnaby Conrad. (HarperCollinsWest, $18.) The glory of saloons as opposed, say, to churches or blood banks is that anyone might drop In. Add an affable host and an enchanted city, and it's guaranteed. Such was Barnaby Conrad's El Matador in 1950s San Francisco, whose guest book sloshed over with convivial celebrity.

The Reagans made their X's therein, and Judy Garland, and Mickey Cohen, fresh out of Alca-traz. Charles Addams drew a triumphant bull brandishing a human'! DEMOCRAT" We deliver more of your world! For subscription information call 707575-7500 today!.