Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • 74

F6 THE HARTFORD COURANT: Wednesday, November 2, 1988 BOOKS Ex-ABC man will direct Channel 61 news team 'X Jj VIA rJffri 'Hi5 El 'tv In 'Breathing Tyler examines a most ordinary family i i.i i IK" 1 I Jt II- II. 1 I. Sherman Williams Tho Hartford Courant news director at Channel 61. Knopf Anne Tyler is the author of "Breathing Lessons." By JAMES ENDRST Courant TV Writer WTIC (Channel 61) announced Tuesday that it has named former ABC network executive W. Vincent Burke as news director.

The Burke hiring is the first formal step Channel 61 has taken in making its long-discussed foray into local news a reality. Burke, 47, will be responsible for building a 10 p.m. weekday newscast at the independent station, targeted for a March 1989 debut. In an interview at the station Tuesday, Burke said several times he was genuinely excited by his new position. "This is a spectacular opportunity to work for a growing company," he said.

"Can you imagine how coach Tom Landry felt when he got to the Dallas Cowboys and they said, 'Well, we don't have a team yet. All we have is a couple of footballs and a place to practice? I think local news is really the future." Formerly vice president of news at WHAS-TV in Louisville, Burke was vice president of news for the ABC-owned television stations from 1982 to 1985. A former investigative reporter, he is an Emmy Award-winning executive producer as well. A native of Springfield, Burke earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at Springfield College. He lives in Darien with his wife, Lynne, and three sons.

Vowing that "there will be no flash-and-trash" on Channel 61's as yet unnamed and unformed newscast, Burke said the program will be "rooted in hard news. There is a commitment to excellence on the part of this company that already exists and is well known in the mar- Bridge By CHARLES GOREN and OMAR Tribune Company Syndicate Neither vulnerable. North deals. NORTH AKQ 9 A 7 0 6 3 2 4 8 6 5 4 2 WEST EAST 7 5 6 3 10 5 3 2 9J986 0 10 8 0 K9 4 97.3 SOUTH 10 9 8 4 2 9 4 A 7 5 A The bidding: North East South West 1 Pass 1 Pass 2 Pass 4 Pass Pass Pass Opening lead: Queen of 0 Most bridge players we know complain about holding too little in the way of high cards. On this deal, declarer might have had a legiti Breathing Lessons By Anne Tyler, Alfred A.

Knopf, $18.95, 327 pp. By CARL SCHOETTLER Baltimore Evening Sun When Maggie Moran offers up a new tuna casserole and asks her daughter Daisy's opinion, Daisy stares back fascinated for the longest time before replying: "Mom? Was there a certain conscious point in your life when you decided to settle for being ordinary?" Maggie's taken aback. "I mean, to me, I'm not ordinary," Maggie says. But she is. Maggie Moran is relentlessly ordinary.

And so is Anne Tyler's latest novel of domestic life in America. The Morans live in Baltimore, but "Breathing Lessons" is not specific to Baltimore. "Breathing Lessons" is a generic version of everyday life among white middle-class families in America, something like those white, and black bags of potato chips at the supermarket. Nothing happens to the Moran family that doesn't happen to millions of American families. And I suppose that's the point.

"Breathing Lessons" is more or less a day in the life of the Moran family Maggie and Ira and their children Daisy and Jesse with occasional flashbacks and reflections on how they got to where they are. Maggie tells the story mostly and her point of view prevails. She's a good-hearted, meddlesome wife and mother who is inclined to ignore reality if it threatens what she conceives of as her family's happiness. Maggie has a penchant for getting things wrong, then acting on her wrong impressions. "It's Maggie's weakness," Ira tells their former daughter-in-law, Fiona, in a moment of truthful pique.

"She believes it's all right to alter people's lives. She thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so she starts changing things around to suit her view of them." She gave up the idea of going to college to work as an aide in an old people's home. "Did she want to be just ordinary?" her family asked. She still works there. She loves it.

Her mother, the daughter of a lawyer and an English teacher, watches Maggie drink beer with her pregnant daughter-in-law and sniffs that Maggie has become "common." Ira is darkly handsome (he's got a dash of Indian blood), detached, dutiful, resigned, faintly ineffectual and quite in love with his wife. "He'd seemed totally unreadable," Maggie recalls, from their courting days. They've been married about 28 years. She's 48. Ira's 50.

"His unreadability was his greatest attraction." He runs Sam's Frame Shop. Sam was his father. As soon as Ira graduated from high school Sam acquired heart trouble. Ira took over the business and the support of Sam and his sisters, Dorrie, who's not too bright, and Junie, who's afraid to leave the apartment over the store. He wanted to become a doctor, but with marriage and children and one thing after another his dream faded.

W. Vincent Burke has been named ketplace, and this newscast will mirror that." Declining to tip his competitive hand on specifics about the size of the news staff, budget and plans for live coverage (the station will not have satellite trucks as the three local affiliates do), Burke said the major distinction of Channel 61's newscast early on will be "that it's on at 10 o'clock. This is an early-to-bed, early-to-rise town," he said. That means the station will, in effect, attempt to pre-empt the local news at 11 p.m. on WFSB (Channel 3), WTNH (Channel 8) and WVIT (Channel 30).

That also means the Channel 61 news team will have a different slate of news priorities especially at the start. "We start with an empty slate so we're not really required by tradition to cover every single news conference by every single elected official in the city of Hartford and New Haven and the state of Connecticut," Burke said. "We're going to pick and choose, and we're going to be very selective about where we apply our resources." (Though WTIC-TV and WTIC Radio are now part of one company, the result of a merger over the past GAMES SHARIF mate complaint that he held too many. The auction was straightforward. When North showed a minimum opening bid, South was not interested in anything more than game.

West led the top of his diamond sequence, attacking declarer's weakness right at the opening salvo. Declarer won the ace and crossed to dummy with a trump to take the club finesse. In with the king of clubs, West continued with the jack of diamonds and a diamond to his partner's king. East exited with a trump. Declarer cleared the ace of clubs, crossed to the table with the ace of hearts and ruffed a club.

Had the suit split 3-3, all would have been well. But when the probabilities prevailed and the suit broke 4-2, declarer was an entry short to use his long club down one. Had declarer's hand been 2 points weaker, he would almost surely have made' his contract. Take away the lure of the club finesse by changing year, Channel 61 owner Arnold Chase says there are no plans to put radio personnel on the air, though he added that there is a natural "synergy" between the two news operations and cooperation between the two news departments is to be expected.) Channel 61 President and General Manager Ed Karlik, who will be overseeing the entire news operation and its development, said, "I think efficiency is a good word" to de-, scribe the station's approach to finances and news coverage. But the news competition in the Hartford-New Haven market is intense, and Burke, who was ap- proached for the news director spot at Channel 8 when News Director Michael Sechrist left a couple of years ago, is familiar with the enemy camp.

"They make few mistakes," said Burke about Channels 3 and 8, call- -ing them respected news institutions. Then, asked whether Channel 61 might go after the news audience tuned into third-place Channel 30, Burke fired off a first, albeit, joking volley. "Is there one to go after?" he asked. the queen of clubs to a low card, and the winning line should have become obvious. After winning the ace of diamonds, declarer should play the ace of clubs and another.

Now he is a tempo ahead. No matter what the defenders do, declarer has the time and entries to set up a long club for a heart discard. The defenders will get two diamond tricks and a club, but that is all. HO NO SO 9M NX HX a a QR ON QB KB KN KR WHITE WINS THE QUEEN Hint Bring up the rear. See solution on comics page only way IIB fcl ijHL Jl jH mi HI mm It i Nothing happens to the Moran family that doesn't happen to millions of American families.

And I suppose that's the point. "Once he had planned to find a cure for some major disease and now he was framing petit point," he reflects sadly, during one of his darker moments. He's become the kind of man who reads Mariner's Library memoirs of men who sail alone around the world and plays intricate games of solitaire. His major curse word is "shoot." He quotes Ann Landers. "Well, face it, there are worse careers than cutting forty-five-degree angles in strips of gilded molding," he muses, or Tyler muses for him.

"And he did have Maggie dropping into his lap like a wonderful gift out of nowhere." Maggie and Ira are off to the funeral of Max Gill, the husband of one of Maggie's best friends in high school, Serena, a flashy girl born out of wedlock to a barmaid: Maggie and Serena used to spy on Serena's father and his wedlocked family at their elegant home. Serena lives about 90 miles from Baltimore, off U.S. 1. Fiona, divorced from their son Jesse, lives out that way, too. Max Gill's memorial service is a wonderfully inventive set-piece, a small tour de force that appeared in The New Yorker magazine.

Serena wants everyone who performed at her wedding in the middle to reprise their performances at the funeral. Sissy Parton plays "My Prayer;" Durwood Clegg sings "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You;" Maggie sings "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing;" Jo Ann McDermott reads Kahlil Gibran, on death this time, not marriage; Sugar Tilghman, who now prefers to be called Elizabeth, concludes the "service" with "Que Sera SeraV' Tyler pulls off this stuff with a mm serene, economical cool. Everything seems right: the names, the corny songs, the faint ridiculousness these middle-aged people feel singing them, the irresistible tug of nostalgia, and underlying everything, perhaps, the sense of the first death in their generation. Maggie and Ira start home, have a brief encounter with an old gentleman who drives as erratically as Maggie, then cut off at Spruce Gum Road to visit Fiona and their granddaughter Leroy in Cartwheel, Pa. Maggie persuades Fiona to come to dinner in the city and perhaps spend a few days.

She promises Jesse will come and she calls him to make sure he will. Ira thinks it's all a bad idea. Ira is mildly disappointed in his children: "His son, who couldn't carry a tune, had dropped out of high school in hopes of becoming a rock star." (Not to mention getting Fiona pregnant well before marriage. Jesse had prevailed on Maggie to persuade her not to have an abortion.) "His daughter was one of those people who fritter themselves away on unnecessary worries." (Yet Daisy manages to get a full scholarship to an Ivy League school. They'll drive her there tomorrow.) "Why was Ira so negative about Jesse?" Maggie wonders, then mulls over her question in a 60-page flashback.

We learn an awful lot about the Moran family by the end of this book, most of it sort of charmingly banal. We're treated to a little supermarket shopping before the Morans get home, where the meeting between Fiona and Jesse, is an immediate" disaster because of Maggie's inept machinations and Ira's appalling compulsion to blurt out the truth. "Oh, Ira," Maggie says, as she drops into bed beside her husband, who is playing solitaire, "what are we two going to do, for the rest of our lives?" Not much, I'd guess, on their record so far. But Maggie snuggles into Ira's shoulder, feels a sort of inner buoyancy, and drifts off to sleep thinking about driving her daughter to school tomorrow. Maybe that'll be Tyler's next novel.

E.P. Dutton identity of a murderer. The hunters' pursuit leads us through seamy quarters in Singapore and Bangkok. The author uses the veterans' search to take us to perverted sex shows where practices go past erotic and enter the realm of sexual atrocities. These detours detract from what is a can't-put-down suspense thriller.

Koko and his trackers bring us back to the United States, where more clues and recollections are divulged. We learn more of the appalling event that took place in a village called la Thuc in Vietnam, which precipitates not only the hunters' post-traumatic behavior but serves, along with revenge, as Koko's motivation. To the very last pages of the novel, the plot is intense and gripping; the twists come fast and hit hard. Questions linger, however, about who prevails, the hunters or the hunted, and about who is truly at fault, the soldiers or the war itself. Donna Russo-Morin is a free-lance writer who lives in North Smithfield, R.I.

1 ii i i i ii n.ii un 1 MnniTimnirnn Horrors of Vietnam haunt 'Koko' Marshmallow still the to make a In a departure from the fantasyhorror genre of earlier novels, Peter Straub "Koko" concerns four Vietnam veterans whose horrific war Koko By Peter Straub, Dutton, $1 9.95, 561 pp. By DONNA RUSSO-MORIN "Do you think there is a real point when then Vietnam stops and now begins? Don't you know that down deep the things that happen to you never really stop happening to you?" The quote is from Maggie Lah, a character in Peter Straub's latest work, "Koko." It is also the message behind this work, which was inspired by the Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C., and the author's brother, a Vietnam veteran. A drastic deviation from Straub's usual genre of dark fantasy horror, "Koko" is a murder mystery with all of the clues and twists of an Agatha Christie whodunit but with the distinctive hallucinogenic imagery so prevalent in Straub's previous works, including "Ghost Story" and "Shadowland." The dedication of the new Vietnam Veteran's War Memorial in the nation's capital is the event that brings the main characters together. Four men who served in the same platoon are reunited at this ceremony. Nightmarish recollections of their experiences in Vietnam resurface.

The veterans' shared memories prove to be clues to murders taking place throughout Asia. The characteristics of the murders are the same as those used during the war by another member of their platoon: Victims are mutiliated, and a regimental playing card with the word Koko written on it is inserted in their mouths. The platoon members decide to pursue the murderer. The many subplots of this novel concern the actions of each man in preparation for the trip or in deciding not to go. One flees from a bad marriage, another from a financially poor and unpromising life, while another can't leave because of his ties to a business and a strange love affair.

In each instance, we see how the horrors suffered in Vietnam control and shape the lives and actions of each man. The author frequently narrates experiences provide clues to the "Koko" is a murder mystery with all the twists of an Agatha Christie whodunit. from inside the characters' heads, allowing us to view these horrific memories for ourselves. While the imagery is successful, the transitions from action to memories are so non-existent that the readers are pulled out of the story in order to make the cognitive transition for themselves. Following the hunters to Asia, we simultaneously track the actions of the killer.

As we enter Koko's mind, we find the hallucinogenic writing Straub favors. It is skillful in exhibiting a realistic sense of the insanity of the character and for revealing clues to his motivation. For a large part, however, the symbolism is so intrusive that it interrupts the flow of the book. VX There's only one way to make a Fluffernutter sandwich; bread peanut butter topped off with the great taste of MARSHMALLOW FLUFF. Of course Fluffologists add extras like sliced apples, bananas or nuts.

No matter how you make yours it's not a Fluffernutter without MARSHMALLOW FLUFF. You might say we put the Fluff in Fluffernutter..