BONDAGE

If you've seen the title and the author's name and you're still reading, you must want the skinny. All right, then: former First Daughter Davis (A House of Secrets, 1991, etc.) has churned out a gloriously self-serious saga of sexual power and dependency that's neither as explicit nor as psychologically penetrating as 9´ Weeks- -much less the Story of O—but represents instead a triumph of marketing over insight and style. The clunkers start early on: in Chapter One, budding teen Sara Norton is already (in 1965) losing her innocence, ``although not quite so quickly as America.'' Stung by harassment into a need to control boys—mainly by learning how to work on the automobile engines that hold the key to their sexual identity—Sara, grown into an apparently poised Hollywood costume designer, is easy prey for rebel director Anthony Cole, whose bondage games (``Do you trust me enough to do things with me you've never done before?'') keep pushing her to surrender—to him, to threesomes including the lead actress in a film he's shooting in Paris and (later) the obliging orangutan trainer back in L.A.—and to her own need to lose control. Meanwhile, Sara's best friend, endlessly seducible Belinda Perry, has gotten tied up too, but only in order to get raped by Phillipe, the charismatic New Age spiritual huckster she's fallen victim to. The hard-won lesson Sara draws from their parallel—after she runs away from a dungeon in which that rascal Anthony's manacled and humiliated her in front of a mob- connected producer, his girlfriend, and two other high-living strangers—is that it's all the same thing: ``It's just another kind of bondage, you know?...It's just that I've been playing it out sexually, and—'' Heavy. So what's next? The Secret Diaries of Amy Carter? Chelsea Clinton in the House of Pain? America, America.