Obscurity Now

By John Skow

WINTER KILLS by RICHARD CONDON 304 pages. Dial. $7.95.

If high accomplishment were, like child molesting, a forgivable crime--if Nobel-prizewinning scientists, wives of former Presidents, old poets and athletes and desiccated jazz musicians were allowed to sink into honorable obscurity five years or so after their last attestable attack of greatness--there would be no Richard Condon problem.

A humane society would let Condon off the hook. His early books, The Oldest Confession, The Manchurian Candidate and A Talent for Loving, are among the maddest funny novels of the last couple of decades. They seemed to have been written by Mephistopheles, raucous with glee at the insane excesses of the human creature. But Condon's last several books have been querulous and scolding.

It should be enough to say that Winter Kills is a gothic farce about the assassination in the early 1960s of U.S. President Tim Keegan. Condon unaccountably gives Keegan a younger half brother named Nick Thirkield who uncovers the plot afterward, and although the shooting occurs in Philadelphia, not Dallas, President Keegan travels to Berlin during the blockade and tells cheering crowds, "Ich bin ein Berliner."

Of course, this is in grossly bad taste, although cynicism prompts the additional observation that taste might not matter if the book were funny. It is not. It is paranoid. Condon clearly wrote the novel to take his suspicions for a stroll, and what he suspects is that the very rich are in conspiratorial control of the country. It turns out that Keegan's billionaire father, in the Old Joe Kennedy slot, arranged with fellow oligarchs to kill his son because President Tim was showing signs of believing his own guff about helping the blacks and the poor.

Condon has unraveled. The world's villainy simply does not work so simply. To pretend that it does is mindless mischief.

sbJohn Skow

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