The Organization Mandible

THE LINCOLN LORDS (556 pp.)--Cameron Hawley--Little, Brown ($5).

There is a feudal clank to the title of Cameron Hawley's latest novel, and for a moment the startled bookshop browser may wonder whether this chronicler of corporate Lancelots has abandoned the executive suite for the ducal fortress. He has done no such thing, of course. The Lords are not border chiefs but a matrimonial amalgam--Lincoln and Maggie Lord, that is. Lincoln is an organization mandible--a tanned, nobly hewn jaw suspended six feet from the floor and usually worth $50,000 a year because it inspires respect and belief when it flaps, strikes fear when it is silent. Pretty, intelligent Maggie, every tailored inch a corporation wife, wonders if there is anything more to her husband.

Her doubt is excusable, because, as the novel opens, Lincoln Lord has been out of a job for eight months, has moved from his suite to a single room in the Waldorf-Astoria, and cannot afford to keep their son in boarding school. He maintains face before the washroom attendant at the Greenbank Club, but his lunchroom tabs there are piling up like unshriven sins. The trouble is that restless Lincoln is a job jumper--he has headed four corporations in the past decade. Is he a phony? Lincoln Lord himself is not sufficiently introspective to consider the problem, and this is his great strength. When things are looking black as a broker's Mercedes, he wangles the presidency of a small cannery, and his wife chides herself for ever having thought him weak. "This was the real man, the man she had fallen in love with, the man she had married."

But complications arise: the anti-Semitic cannery owner wants Lord to fire a bright, deserving young Jew, and it also looks as if the firm's baby food has started an infant epidemic. Will Lord quit under fire, as he has done before, and slink off to accept a college presidency? In providing the unimportant answer to this unimportant question, Novelist Hawley shows that he has refined his prose technique since Executive Suite and Cash McCall; the tedium of his narrative's implacable forward progress is now unrelieved by any fresh thought or phrase, or even by a friendly old cliche. The business world is a valid and fascinating locale for fiction, and Lincoln Lord spouting ghostwritten eloquence is a recognizable type. But in telling his story without really analyzing him, Hawley does no better than his hero: he just keeps that handsome jaw moving.

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