BRILLIANT DIVORCES

From the author of Till the End of Time (1990), The President's Women (1988) and other pat-a-cake pastimes, another bubble-bath soaker (Singer's seventh) featuring mate acquisitions and doffings, a glittery off-lot Hollywood atmosphere, and a sexathon spaced throughout like drum bongs in a polka. At the start, gorgeous actress Honey Rose is reunited with old school pals Babe and Sam(antha) in the grand California house of Sam's (unjustly) hated stepmother Nora. After some snappy divorce chat and the discovery that Babe's senator husband is a wife-beater, the story takes giant steps backward to 1943—and the tale of Nora's four marriages. A good sort, English Nora, daughter of a barmaid, never really married handsome Hubert Hartiscor, who was gay, but she loved him and was accepted nonetheless by Hubert's dad, Lord Jeffrey, as legit. Her son, small Hubie, is a desired heir, although he was sired during a one-night stand by a G.I. from Montana. Then Hubert commits suicide (the family is the most dreadful mess), and Nora marries Lord J., later actor Nick, Ambassador Martin, and finally movie mogul T.S. Grant, most reluctant father (maybe) of Sam, who adores him. It's back to Honey, then, whose father, Teddy, is an alcoholic Great Writer, and to Babe, whose parents...well, never mind: it all works out. A strangle of plot—awesome is the wipe-out of a noble English family: pedophilic assaults, incest, murder, suicide—and grandly silly, of course, but count on circulation.