Liederkranz

By John Skow

MONEY IS LOVE by RICHARD CONDON 302 pages. Dial. $8.95.

The patient is sitting up and taking umbrage. After several dolorous books, Richard Condon, no black humorist but an eyeball-red one in the great, ranting days of The Manchurian Candidate and The Oldest Confession, seems to be stirring faintly back to life. Money Is Love does have patches so swampy that even addicted admirers will cast down their eyes in shame, but the life signs are nevertheless strong: "Mason took in enough cannabis smoke to allow a Lipan Apache manipulating a blanket over it to transmit the complete works of Tennyson. He swallowed hard. He held it down until his eyes watered, then he blew it out slowly. He grinned at her broadly. 'Your husband was murdered in front of Bloomingdale's at two-ten this afternoon.' "

This is not great Condon, but it is good Condon. The murdered dude was a whiz-bang insurance salesman, the best-dressed knight of the Million Dollar Round Table and a sure bet to pull down $ 150,000 a year. Naturally his wife wants him back. Using a computerized electronic prayer wheel that she whips up with her soldering iron, she petitions all gods ancient and modern, known or rumored, and becomes (to the surprise of the gods themselves) the first soul in recorded eternity to get a message through.

Her plea occurs at a particularly convenient time, because angels of every condition have convened in historic Liederkranz Hall on Manhattan's East 58th Street, between Park and Lexington Avenues, to hammer out a new moral code for human society. The angels cannot understand a relatively new development called "money," which has become the most powerful of humanity's totems. They begin to suspect that the million-dollar lapel grabber and his wife can help.

But there is a complication that no one can understand. Commemorative china plates issued in high-priced limited editions by the schlock art industry --displaying grackles by Boehm, farmhouses by Wyeth, Wedgwood heads of Commerce Secretary Frederick B. Dent, and so on--have become the back-up currency of the overheated U.S. economy. Another complication is that Athena, Apollo, that bisexual twit Hermes, and Zeus, 42 ft. tall but disguised, more or less, as a skirt-chasing municipal court judge, have settled in above a Greek restaurant on 18th Street, hoping to get some of the action.

Incoherence approaches an absolute. It would take George Bernard Shaw to handle the resultant ironies of God, man and money. Condon merely bangs the ironies together, hoping that they will make comical sounds. Such is his rare and clangorous gift that sometimes they do. sbJohn Skow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.