Notable

POPPA JOHN by Larry Woiwode Farrar Straus Giroux; 204 pages; $10.95

The hero of Author Larry Woiwode's third novel is Ned O'Rourke, an aging actor who has spent twelve years playing a lovable, Bible-quoting old coot named Poppa John on a TV soap opera. For reasons not entirely clear, the producers have killed off Poppa John, the show's most popular character. It is now the Christmas season, and Ned, despite all those years of six-figure salaries, is suddenly worried about how to scratch together $200 for the January rent on his Manhattan apartment. He has become too famous as Poppa John to get other acting jobs or TV work.

Those who believe that will fall for anything. Television endlessly recycles the celebrity it bestows; if Dallas' J.R. had been fatally shot, Larry Hagman would not, like Ned, be padding about in fraying tennis shoes, looking for work. Yet the implausibility of Woiwode's premise would hardly matter if he had made the unlikely seem inevitable. Instead, he channels his energies into sour asides on the state of modern urban life and spasms of empurpled prose: "The drink was gone. The last of it was going in a crawling sear down his esophagus, and then it struck his stomach with the breath-stopping burn of eating at the membrane over an ulcer."

Too bad. On the evidence of What I'm Going to Do, I Think (1969) and Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975), Larry Woiwode is a writer worth listening to. Poppa John offers a great deal of noise and the whisper of a fine short story: an old man struggles to accept the long-ago death of his father, in preparation for facing his own. The novel's power lies here, at several removes from the small screen.

WHO KILLED KAREN SILKWOOD? by Howard Kohn Summit; 462 pages; $14.95

"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong," said Thoreau, "as when you find a trout in the milk." In Who Killed Karen Silkwood? the odor of rotten fish is overpowering. Outside Oklahoma City, on a cold November evening in 1974, Silkwood drove along Highway 74 to meet a New York Times reporter. Her mission: to present evidence of safety violations at a Kerr-McGee nuclear processing plant. She never arrived. Her car swerved on the dry, straight road and plowed into a culvert. Almost immediately, according to Howard Kohn, company, state and federal officials began frenzied work, not to find out what truly occurred but to prove that Silkwood's death was accidental. Many of the officials also loudly raised questions about her character, digging up and releasing details of a failed marriage and past sexual conduct. Their efforts only raised questions; the case, unlike the victim, would not die.

Kohn, an editor of Rolling Stone, has spent the past six years studying the Silkwood story. He documents his claims of a vast cover-up that followed the accident and proves beyond any reasonable doubt that many people had reasons for wanting Silkwood silenced. The case was so volatile that a jury awarded the Silkwood family damages of $10.5 million. But should there be a charge of murder? Kohn cannot be sure. Ultimately, he fails to finger a culprit or offer a principal suspect. All he can do is present a detailed and disturbing mystery story.

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