Behind the Front Page

THE WHOLE TRUTH by Robert Daley. 409 pages. New American Library. $5.95.

Even before publication, Robert Daley's satirical roman `a clef about a Great New York Newspaper set off much who's-who gossip in the city room of a Great New York Newspaper. Who, for example, is Paul Pettibon, the Paris bureau chief with the ego of a De Gaulle and a sense of insecurity to rival that of Charlie Brown's pal Linus? Who is Jack L. Banglehorster, the slow-moving, ruminative foreign editor who feels that his first duty is "to report the same news the opposition papers reported"?

No matter whom they may more or less resemble in life, author Daley's caricature creatures seem more like conventioneering Rotarians or stodgy minor bureaucrats than journalistic giants. Bureau chiefs loll about sidewalk cafes or tool around in chauffeurdriven limousines, rewriting local newspapers, and big-name correspondents interview one another over grog. The biggest fraud is Pettibon, "The Paper's" man in Paris. Despite the Pulitzer Prize he won, the books he wrote, the generals and Prime Ministers he met and conquered, Pettibon is a cheesecloth hero. He pretends fluent French and frets over whether his latest story will be gloriously "fronted," ingloriously "shorted" or humiliatingly "not used."

Pettibon's ultimate downfall is accelerated by the discovery that he has been having an affair with plain Willow Plunkett, a randy secretary in his Paris office. That is too much for visiting Editor Banglehorster. A man of Pettibon's status, he feels, "should have got an actress or an ambassador's wife. Such a man did not belong in Paris. He did not belong in London. He did not belong on the foreign staff."

Unfortunately, Author Daley (who used to be a New York Times correspondent) commands a prose style all too reminiscent of the newspaper he satirizes. And the satire itself is nowhere near the first rank of press spoofery, which is occupied alone by Evelyn Waugh's brilliant Scoop! The Whole Truth can only be taken as a broad burlesque of pat-a-cake editors, cream-puff reporters, puff-piece journalists--crumb-bums all.

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