JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT

This is prepaid with a $500,000 movie sale and a six cipher paperback arrangement and the subsidiary enthusiasm of its publisher in collusion with an author who is billed as ""just right for TV."" Thus it seems primed to fill the empty space left by the late Miss Susann although actually Jay Presson Allen is a much cleverer and more knowing woman (scenarist of Cabaret, Forty Carats, etc.). And if there's less sex, or ""visible ardor"" as it's called here, and much less soap, the novel has a lot of wattage and sophisticated scene-setting in the two-tone plastic world of films, books, art, real estate and anything else that passes for big change. Most of it belongs to a conglomerate financier Max Herschel, 62, no couth but a dynamic man who gets his viggerish all over--rand Bones, his top gift of fourteen years who's beautiful and essentially as smart as he is until she decides she wants to get married to a young writer and have a baby and, as Herschel says, become a ""fucking fantasy."" But Bones will not be permitted to go gently--he strips her of her share in the film company she runs and her art gallery and her apartment and just mashes her ""like a doodlebug."" Until after the death of Max's wife whom he's kept in ""emotional antisepsis"" for years when. . . . There is the possibility that this may be too sophisticated high-low class entertainment for the folks out there in between the two coasts but it has a Save the Tiger-ish snap, it's sharp-witted, and often very funny.