Cheese!

By John Skow

THE VERTICAL SMILE by Richard Condon. 334 pages. Dial. $6.95.

Richard Condon strikes a chord of universality at the very beginning of his new novel. Given enough time, and allowing for certain obvious exceptions--Moby-Dick and the Hardy Boys' Hunting for Hidden Gold come to mind--almost every novel since the invention of movable type could have been called, with poetry and justice, The Vertical Smile. The imagination turns jelly-kneed: War and Vertical Smiles, Remembrance of Smiles Vertical, The Sun Also Smiles Vertically. Condon thought up the title first, however, and he picks up the marbles. No one will ever slip a better description of the exterior aspect of the human female sexual apparatus into the Library of Congress Catalog.

From this prominence, unfortunately, it is all downhill. Condon was never a satirist: he was a riot in a satire factory. He raged at Western civilization and every last one of its works. He decorticated the Third Reich, cheese fanciers, gossip columnists and the Hollywood star system with equal and total frenzy. Since the foaming manias of The Oldest Confession and The Manchurian Candidate, Condon's fine, random wrath has aged until it is nothing more than irritability. Once he could have picked up the Republican and Democratic parties by their tails and swung them around his head like a couple of dead cats, as he tries to do in the present novel. Now he can't manage it.

In The Vertical Smile he mocks a handsome and vacuous presidential hopeful, Duncan Mulligan, who must be the crookedest, most wooden-headed and hypocritical Wall Street lawyer not actually in jail. The candidate has been chosen by the Eastern establishment--that is, the Justice Department, the Mafia, Wall Street and the elders of the Church of Christ, Computer. The trouble is that Mulligan's youth image is endangered because his 68-year-old mother-in-law is having an affair with a 70-year-old man. Their attraction must be cooled, because to the young American voter, any suggestion of sex past the age of 30 is obscene.

Except for Condon's description of the arrangement between the Mafia and the FBI, which is rather nice, there is not even much style to recommend. One or two sentences, not more, are worth prizing out of their settings to be enjoyed. "She laughed," Condon writes with a bit of the old jazz, in "three low musical tones, deliciously, like a dying sailor's memory of a whorehouse doorbell." Let the dying reader's memory be of The Manchurian Candidate.

--John Skow

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