BOOKS

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE FOURTH K

by Mario Puzo

Random House; 479 pages; $22

Mario Puzo's classic Godfather recipe combined zesty ethnic ingredients with basic American free enterprise. Good and evil were all in the family. Social values were relative, if not hypocritical. Puzo is not your average moralist. He does not pontificate from the high ground. His view of human nature is subterranean, not to say labyrinthine. The twists and turns in his new novel might have easily confused the Minotaur.

But not the modern reader, who will probably be more attentive to Puzo's vivid cynicism and gallows humor than to his gridlock plot. When two nutty M.I.T. students blow up Manhattan's sleazy Times Square area with a miniature A-bomb, it seems as if the author has urban renewal, not tragedy, on his mind.

Elsewhere Puzo is dead serious about the tendency of money and power to corrupt. The Fourth K of the title is President of the U.S. Francis Xavier Kennedy, a fictive cousin of John and Robert's. F.X.K. is a clever invention, but he also shares characteristics with The Godfather's Michael Corleone. Both are intelligent young men whose high ideals are tarnished by a brutal world. In fact, it is idealists who cause most of the trouble. When a group of Arab terrorists known as the One Hundred kill the Pope, hijack a jet carrying the U.S. President's daughter and then murder her to demonstrate that they mean business, F.X.K. responds with force. He destroys a gleaming new city in the Middle Eastern country that harbored the hijackers.

The problem is that the city was built with $50 billion put up by a now upset U.S. businessman. He also belongs to the Socrates Club, whose membership represents the nation's richest and most powerful private citizens. They, too, see F.X.K.'s readiness to sacrifice overseas investments as an expensive precedent.

The aggressive ways in which F.X.K. handles foreign and domestic threats to his presidency and his life allow Puzo to pull out all the stops. Philosophical dialogues about the nature of power, byzantine schemes and even elements of science fiction find their way into the mix. Amazingly, it works. Puzo's inventions may read like a parody of a best-selling thriller, but his characters give off sparks of intelligence and complexity. If some of the principals seem to belong to the Hollywood power structure rather than to the Washington elite, it is undoubtedly because the author knows the entertainment mob far better than the godfathers of government.