Eaten Up

MAYBE SEX AND politics can be mixed to produce literature and social commentary, but fat adventure stories about Washington, which always include the sex and the politics, can rarely be included in the categories of either social commentary or literature. Tom Wicker's Facing the Lions is Washington soap opera--not of literature or social commentary.

Novels like The President's Plane is Missing or Advise and Consent don't have much going for them except their surface narrative. If Facing the Lions is that kind of book you can't put down, it's also the kind of book you rapidly forget if you do put it down.

In Wicker's version of the Washington novel, the bureau chief of a prestigious newspaper goes to the funeral of a one-time presidential contender. A series of flashbacks and anecdotes develop the relationship between the bureau chief (an old Southern boy who bears a more than passing resemblance to Wicker himself) and the presidential contender (once a young firebrand from the same state as the bureau chief, who in his later years retired on the job in the Senate).

Wicker handles the technical problems of flash-backs to carry the narrative but his characters are always two-dimensional, cardboard stereotypes: A newspaper man, a senator, his beautiful wife, a political boss who wears green glasses, a collection of local southern politicians.

The newspaper man slept with the Senator's wife. The political boss torpedoed the senator's presidential bid. Years ago the Senator had triumphed over the local pols, though he never managed to beat the regulars at the national level. The action is the standard sort in political novels, and the characters are of the equally standard sort.

With a few additions or subtractions, the group can star in any political adventure. But Wicker's characters, however stereotyped they may be, do have one saving grace: they are not a collection of disguised Hubert Humphreys, Barry Goldwaters and Arthur Krocks. Facing the Lions is in no sense a roman a clef. The characters are, if not Wicker's own, at least the inhabitants of the imaginary world of political fiction.

AT LEAST Wicker's newspaper man is his own creation. Morgan, the fictional bureau chief, may not be totally autobiographical, but Wicker's experience as a newspaper man has evidently been of more use to him in constructing fictional newspaper reporters than his experience watching political figures has been in constructing politicians.

People don't read action-packed panoramic, superficial novels to learn how Tom Wicker feels about newspaper business, even when Tom Wicker wrote the book in question. Facing the Lions is kind of light weight entertainment, nothing more, though it is pretty successful in its own way--better than most of what Drury or Knebel produced. Precisely why Tom Wicker would spend his time writing this kind of book is unclear, but even if Facing the Lions is only entertainment no less mindless than television, it has more sex on its pages than is likely to come for some time over the airwaves.