Frenzy at Daybreak

THE MAN by Irving Wallace. 766 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

This tasteless story is laid in the near future, and it pretends that Douglass Oilman, the first Negro President in U.S. history, has just entered the White House. He has arrived there by a singular coincidence of disaster: the Vice President has died of a heart attack, the President and Speaker of the House have both been crushed by a collapsing ceiling. Dilman, as president pro tem of the U.S. Senate, is next in line. In Wallace's contrived exercise, Dilman is made to contend with 1) a son who belongs to a Black Muslim-type society,

2) a daughter who tries to pass as white,

3) a Senate that tries to impeach him, and 4) a Russian Premier who believes that he must secretly hate the society that rejects him. Novelist Wallace (The Chapman Report) embarked on The Man, he reports, by taking up his note pad and pencil one evening "and writing in a frenzy whatever came to my mind until daybreak." Obviously.

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