The Treatment

ZOTZ! (286 pp.)--Walter Karig--Rinehart ($2.75)

As any amateur satirist knows, the hordes of captains, majors, commanders and other brasshats stationed in wartime Washington had other and even more crushing duties than just winning the war. Reams of mimeographed balderdash had to be stamped IMMEDIATE ACTION and provided with desk space on which to gather dust. Rival service arms had to be watched for symptoms of credit-grabbing. Above all, callers with something to offer that might help win the war had to be given The Treatment: identified, badged and tirelessly "channeled" from building to building and service to service till they wound up in despair back at Union Station.

Most such visitors caught on in a few days and trotted along home like good little boys. One who didn't is the hero--or victim--of this novel, mild, baldish Dr. John Jones, Professor of the Assyrio-Bdbylonic, Chaldean, Phoenician, Etruscan and Turkish languages at St. Jude's Theological Seminary.

Midway in the war, little Jones is browsing happily around in Astyparaean, a language no one has spoken for 50 centuries. There he encounters an old god, name of Zotz, who confers on him a weird and deadly power. Any insect, beast or man that Jones points at falls in a hideous faint; if he both points and says "Zotz!" the pointee drops horribly dead. Jones naively goes to Washington to offer this handy power to the Armed Forces. The rest of the book and war he spends being shuttlecocked from plyboard office to plyboard office, receiving but failing to respond to The Treatment. This gives Author Karig (himself a captain in the Naval Reserve) a chance to set up a gallery of fine portraits in brass and then paint mustaches on them.

The highest officer Jones ever gets to see is young Brigadier General Bullblank, A.A.F. The young general testily offers him three minutes to explain his mission, but uses up the three minutes and nearly an hour more orating to Jones on the minor branches of the Armed Forces. These include the "musical comedy Marines . . . in the Pacific"; the Navy which "sits around . . . eating steak three times a day fried in butter," and the Army which is stalling the war along "until a Ground Forces officer receives the surrender. They'll cheat us [the Air Forces] out of it. Well, by God, we won't leave a sucking soul alive in Germany to surrender! That's what we'll do!" His hand reaches for a desk button and presses it, and Jones is on his way out.

Once Jones, through a political value he did not know he had, almost slips out of channels and up to the President. The 1944 election is coming on, this is a democracy, and minorities are important. A White House secretary hears of Jones and figures he's just the boy to deliver the votes of "the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Turks, the Etruscans and God knows how many other minorities." But the White House secretary turns out to be just one of Steve Early's minor assistants. Jones's appointment is delayed until Franklin Roosevelt dies--and Jones returns to his rounds of the plyboard offices. He is still there at war's end.

Fun-poking at wartime Washington is, of course, old hat. But in Zotz! (which is the Book-of-the-Month co-choice for October) the old hat is tilted at a rakish angle, and Navy Captain Karig, 50, doesn't spare the Navy in his ribbing.

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