James Michener

Any reader familiar with James Michener's books will approach his new novel, called "The Novel," with some uneasiness. "Hawaii," "Iberia," "Poland," "Texas" and the many other doorstop books on which Michener has built his fortune are distinguished most by their startling comprehensiveness.

James Michener says he plans to keep writing five hours a day while he spends his winters teaching and taking part in a college program for 216 retired professionals and their spouses. The author said Wednesday that he and his wife, Mari, have settled on the Academy of Senior Professionals at Eckerd College in which to pass their time from October to February. They had looked at about 40 possibilities. "It's what people my age look for," said Michener, 83.

James Michener wrote a plea to three young men who pleaded guilty to anti-Semitic vandalism: "Get off that doomed train right now." A judge had given the men an unusual sentence: learn about the Nazi Holocaust. Part of the assignment was to read a chapter from the author's book "Poland" on a concentration camp. After learning of the sentence, Michener wrote to the men through the judge, John Carey, who said Wednesday he was moved by the author's interest.

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Let's begin with the good part. About a third of the way into this brief novel, around Page 80, one has a sense of being inside an old-fashioned but beautifully maintained narrative machine, the storytelling equivalent of, say, a "cherry" 1950 Rolls-Royce. It was here the reviewer, a first-time James A. Michener reader, began to have intimations of the novelist celebrated by an enormous international public.

I confess that I have always had a reader's block about James Michener's novels. I begin them with determination, but about 70% into them, they get laid aside and never picked up again. But this is one Michener novel I finished. It is surely Michener's thinnest at a mere 149 pages (plus the text of the U. S. Constitution). It is the contemporary story of an Army major who works for the President's National Security Council. In fact, he works for Adm. John Poindexter.

Pulitzer prize-winning author James A. Michener's first book of fiction, "Tales of the South Pacific,"enraptured millions. In this issue of Traveling In Style, Michener takes our readers back to the same islands on another visit, 40 years later. In "Return to the South Pacific," the noted author meets again a number of characters from his book, including the legendary Aggie Grey, who fed and sheltered American Marines in Western Samoa during World War II.

Over at Random House, the corporate heads were spinning in a state of collective amazement. In tones worthy of the announcement of some major scientific discovery, they could only profess awe at what, for want of a better term, they are calling the Michener Phenomenon. Publishing records are sometimes rubbery, but "Texas," James Michener's 32nd book, appeared to be setting some and shattering others as it entered its fifth printing--at 1.