A Bad Dealer

THE NINTH WAVE (332 pp.)--Eugene Burdick--Houghfon Mifflin ($3.95).

In this first-novel winner of the Houghton Mifflin award, Author Burdick gives a reverse twist to the cozy U.S. sociological convention that coarse, conservative fathers produce sensitive, nonconformist sons. It is a study of Mike Freesmith, whose father was a radical so militant he once smashed the family Christmas tree into bourgeois smithereens. To contrast his old man, Mike determines to become a "big wheeler and dealer." He starts rolling as a clean-limbed, sexually limber nihilist on a surfboard off the coast of South ern California. He is supposed to be getting an education; instead he is educating the English teacher in the arts of love. He goes on in this way to become a Big Man on Campus at Stanford, then a political lawyer with a puppeteer's talent for running the show from behind the scenes. Along the way, he exploits and blows cigar smoke into the faces of a whole range of characters, from his liberal-minded wife (whom he marries for her vineyards), and a blackmail-prone professor, up to the top brass of the California Democratic Party. He is cool, ruthless, sadistic; even his one friend, Hank Moore, sees him as a lost, fragmented being--an "upward mobile."

By the time he is set to mastermind the election for governor of a drunken windbag named John Cromwell, Freesmith has developed into a full clinical picture of an icy-hearted opportunist in action. He figures that fear plus hate equals power. By manipulating the fear of poverty of California's "senior citizens" and exploiting general hatred of Communism, he hopes to become the real governor of California. In a not quite credible solution, his pal Hank removes the hard hand of Mike Freesmith from the public weal.

Novelist Burdick, who teaches political theory at the University of California, says that he originally intended his novel as "a study on the 'irrational' trends in politics," but it grew into a portrait of one man, Mike. As a novel, it has its structural and narrative faults. Still, it stands by itself as a disquieting, often fascinating portrait of a recognizable type of politician, a type who in real life, perhaps unfortunately, usually lacks a friend willing to dispose of him.

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