Tedium at the Top

A MOMENT IN CAMELOT by Maggie Rennert. 713 pages. Bernard Ge/'s Associates. $8.95.

The latest of Publisher Bernard Geis' calculated jousts with sensationalism is less a matter of bad taste than of no taste. Where Geis' The King and The Exhibitionist were at least spicy, A Moment in Camelot is colorless and odor less and practically endless.

Its inadequately veiled subject is of course the Kennedys (here named Alec and Andrea Girard) and the people around them during their brief years in Washington. The story picks up round about 1960 and inches through the primaries and the election, breeding along the way several sluggish subplots. At some indeterminate date, the book leaves what may for simplicity's sake be called historical fact and concentrates on 1) the tragic illness (leukemia) of the President's little daughter, 2) the marital difficulties of one of the invented characters, and 3) a civil rights demonstration in Alabama. There is no assassination in Dallas; possibly Rennert is saving this for a sequel.

The author, a former journalist, is said to have been "a full-time member of the circle she re-creates so vividly," but her novel reads as if it had been re searched in back numbers of Modern Romances. All the women's-fiction cliches are present: men are "movie-hero tall and handsome"; there is nearly as much obstetrics as sex; crises arise from the misbehavior of children and the absence of husbands at birthday parties. Teddy White would never recognize the politics, although anybody over 13 should have no trouble recognizing the personnel.

If Author Rennert's is the reality behind Camelot, stick with the myth.

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