Tycoon

This literary, Texan soap opera featuring oil, ambition and sexual obsession reads as though its author overdosed on TV reruns of Dallas. Narrator Billy Brewster III, who loses his girl and a chunk of his family business to his rags-to-riches partner Stan Gaines, exudes a cynical detachment that eventually makes his soul-searching tiresome. Gaines, a brash oil-and-real-estate wheeler-dealer with a ``Dale Carnegie manner'' and a self-invented past, is never fully humanized though we learn about his Vietnam War experience and meet his mother, a pious, elderly eccentric. Pringle ( A Fine Time to Leave Me ) tosses in many ingredients one might encounter on prime time: a blustering patriarch, an oil baron having a long affair with his partner's wife, sex in unusual settings or positions, a burnt-out marriage and so forth. The first few chapters almost feel like a geyser, then sludge seeps in. (Mar.)