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Camelot With an Attitude
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19753 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1991 |
1,911 Words |
| Author
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Mark Schaffer
Mark Schaffer, who lives in Washington, D.C., writes
frequently on fiction and popular culture. He is the coeditor
of the forthcoming More Office Humor and is currently working
on a book about the Warner Brothers television studios of the
fifties. |
THE FOURTH K
Mario Puzo
New York: Random House, 1991
408 pp., $21.95
What if there was another Kennedy, more brilliant and capable than his famous slain predecessors. And what if such a man became president in the not too distant future, a perilous future curiously like the one we are living in now? Idle speculation of academic bull sessions? Perhaps. For Mario Puzo, creator of The Godfather saga, and chronicler extraordinaire of the passions of ego and power, it has become the springboard for a delirious global thriller that is, as the blurbs say, "torn from today's headlines."
At first glance, The Fourth K is familiar territory--big, tense, world hopping, crammed with the dramatis personae of modern political cliffhangers--presidents, Middle Eastern potentates, wily terrorists, star-struck radicals, rooms filled with cabinet members, senators, lawyers, gorgeous, intelligent women, and gasping business types. Puzo has probably signed the contract for the miniseries.
The man who gave us in the Corleones one of the touchstones of postwar American popular culture (a family and crime dynasty of Elizabethan dimensions and richness) here creates a modern parable of another iconic clan--the Kennedys. In doing so, he has attempted to blend the sad bricolage of the past twenty-five years--assassination, shadow governments, Watergate, terrorist wars, nuclear blackmail, international financial gangsterism--into an ingenious, sometimes trenchant cautionary tale of what might yet be. He's scanned the international thriller competition and figured out how he could beat the players at their own game.
Kennedy, a white knight
Francis Xavier Kennedy, a cousin of the martyred men, rises swiftly on the political graph, through the usual combination of Kennedy brilliance and devastating charm, to the presidency. Francis Kennedy is the liberal white knight, a man too good to be true. Sensitive to the inequities still widespread in the country, he worked tirelessly to alter the balance of power. A virtuoso of the "photo opportunity," he relinquishes his personal fortune on nationwide television, and speaks movingly of "a new social contract." Keenly wary of tragic Kennedy history, deeply embedded in the national psyche, he has allowed himself to be surrounded by an impenetrable network of human and electronic security far
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