Short Notices

KHRUSHCHEV by Mark Frankland 213 pages. Stein & Day. $6.95.

In future histories, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev may be dismissed as a mere transitional figure. But in Russia's painful move from a malevolent monolith to a more responsible member of world society, he was essential. His Cold War contemporaries described him variously as a Red Hitler and a Jolly St. Nik, a shoe banger and a shrewd geo-politician. Before his ouster in 1964 by less colorful but more pragmatic men, Khrushchev had justified at least some of those descriptions: he denounced Stalin and initiated the cultural thaw in Soviet life; he built the Berlin Wall and wisely backed down from the Cuban missile crisis after rashly getting into it; most important, he allowed the Soviet economy to become consumer oriented, a process that has begun to alter the very nature of Marxism.

This book by the London Observer's former Moscow correspondent fails to bring Khrushchev alive, but it raises questions about all the unknowns in his life: what was his childhood like; was he really a sadistic Stalinist during the old days as a commissar of the Moscow subway; did his war experiences turn him away from Stalin; did he become a "goulash Communist" only after the showdown in Cuba; why did he permit Brezhnev and Kosygin to ease him out? This book fails to answer those questions, but only Nikita can do the job--and he is unlikely to write his memoirs.

ASSASSINS by Nicholas Mosley. 252 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.95.

Q. Why is it that modern novels have to be different, that they can't just be stories of characters and action and society?

A. We know too much about characters and action and society. We can now write about people knowing.

This is a typically enigmatic bit of dialogue from Nicholas Mosley's recent thriller Accident, and it seems to apply even more to his new one, Assassins, which is half mystery, half "people knowing." During a top-level international conference, the motherless 14-year-old daughter of the British Foreign Secretary is kidnaped by a would-be political assassin. Her fate is in the hands of three of her elders: the chief government security officer, her father and his secretary, who is also his mistress. The latter is a disturbing woman-- passive, manipulative, all things to the weaknesses of all men--seemingly a sister of the wife in Harold Pinter's The Homecoming. It is no accident that Pinter adapted Mosley's earlier novel for the movies. For both writers, ambiguity is truth itself. And for Mosley's characters, a mere problem of survival is too simple. The reader who follows the course of Assassins to its appropriately absurd end will be rewarded by a sophisticated plot, a cartographer's awareness of English landscape and a wealth of similes that are nearly as good as Mary McCarthy's. But characters, action, society? Hardly.

ALONG THE CLIPPER WAY by Francis Chichester. 256 pages. Coward-McCann. $5.95.

Released just in time to capitalize on the headlines resulting from Sir Francis' 28,500-mile odyssey in Gipsy Moth IV, this little book may be mistaken at first glance for an account of the 65-year-old mariner's adventures. Actually, it is a sketchy, jerry-built anthology of sea tales by others who sailed at least some portion of the great clipper way followed by Skipper Chichester on his 226-day voyage. Since the book contains extracts from the best known yarns of such seafaring types as Sir Francis Drake, Joseph Conrad and Richard Henry Dana, stitched together with Old Sailor Chichester's own brief commentary on such dangers as icebergs, scurvy, sea monsters and gales, it is predictably absorbing. Still, it is obviously only a warmup for what Chichester undoubtedly plans as a rousing encore: an account of his own epic voyage.

THE RIGHT IMAGE by James D. Horan. 432 pages. Crown. $5.95.

Can a rich but unscrupulous wheelchair-bound tycoon buy the U.S. presidency for his personable Congressman son? Well, this breathless book says that he can -- if he has the assistance of a ruthless second son, and is prepared to pay a couple of conniving political geniuses $1,000,000 a year to give his charming offspring a doozied-up image as a vigorous battler for human rights.

Kelly Shannon drifts along in happy anonymity in Congress, spending his weekends playing rough games with his large, noisy, competitive family, until Papa becomes obsessed with this dream of putting him in the White House. Enough money lavished in the right places brings Kelly a thick folder containing evidence of corruption in high places. Soon he is a fixture on TV, the most talked-about young politician in the country. In fact, the path to the White House seems clear until Kelly runs headlong into his own conscience.

After a couple of chapters, it becomes apparent that the Shannon family is strictly fictitious and any resemblance to a real American family is coincidental -- or, at any rate, deplorable. But Old Hearst Newsman Horan, who has knocked out 24 books (King's Rebel, The Great American West) since 1942, is obviously trying hard to create the impression that he is writing a roman `a clef about the Kennedys. For this reason alone, his account of money as the lubricant of U.S. politics just might become the most ineptly written bestseller of the month.

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