Helpless Giant

By Horace Judson

COME NINEVEH, COME TYRE

by ALLEN DRURY

481 pages. Doubleday. $8.95.

Long ago, in the sane dull Washington of 1958, Journalist Allen Drury wrote his first novel--the one for which he is remembered--Advise and Consent. That was a blowsy, likable, jump-all-over-you book, about a Senate battle against confirmation of a Secretary of State; about a band of stalwart lawmakers, including one Senator being blackmailed for homosexuality; about a society hostess, and so on. It made a great read. It won Drury the Pulitzer Prize, which he even perhaps deserved: he had had the energy to people a big novel with a lot of boldly drawn characters and keep them moving through incidents and operatic set pieces. Beyond that, he was a man of sense and rugged principle--though his heroes all seemed to employ the same turgid speechwriter.

Then history began to play tricks on Allen Drury. The U-2 incident and Khrushchev banging his shoe. First moves into Viet Nam. Civil rights in the South. In the 1962 sequel to Advise and Consent, Drury tried to keep up. He escalated his story into a counterinsurgency war in Central Africa, coupled with radical attempts to exploit racial strife in the U.S. He also moved his senatorial heroes into the still windier forum of the United Nations. But these days no writer should play "Can You Top This?" with history.

Come Nineveh, Come Tyre is the fifth and penultimate novel in what the author calls the Advise and Consent series. Escalation has continued. Nothing less than the destruction of the American republic, and its transformation into a totalitarian dictatorship, is this book's story. It includes the assassination of a presidential candidate, the suicides of a President and a Vice President, and an incipient bloodless takeover of the U.S. by Russia. Drury's political principles have hardened into sclerotic pieties. Few would argue that the Soviet Union could never be tempted into acting out her ancient ambitions, or that U.S. military strength and civil concord are not important to keeping the peace and pre serving the Constitution. But Drury finished his novel in February--and history, that heartless bitch, has stood him up again, with the Watergate investigations and the Agnew scandal. Characters more fascinating, events more crowded, a conspiracy against the Constitution far more plausible than any thing Drury has invented. It is not Drury's country that is a helpless giant, after all. It is his novel.

Horace Judson

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