Phase II Fallout

By Melvin Maddocks

THE NIXON RECESSION CAPER by RALPH MALONEY 192 pages. Norton. $5.95.

The proceedings open with a suitably clever premise--grade-A Alec Guinness, actually. Four respectable citizens, pillars of a Fairfield County country club, have lost their upper-tax-bracket jobs during the present little economic adjustment. They make up the champagne casualties -- the affluent walking wounded. Sandy Campbell is an ex-vice president of a mutual fund, shot down with the market. Jack Carmody is an ex-ad-agency ace, gone up in smoke with his TV cigarette accounts. Sam Deitsch is a dress manufacturer who laid it on the hemline for the midi. Harry Price is all the has-beens rolled into one: ex-movie star, ex-producer, ex-director -- ex-box office.

Every one of them a loser willing to die to look like a winner still, the four keep up their front all the way to the welfare-check line. Author Ralph Maloney's point is obvious but rather profoundly true: the one unforgivable crime is to be broke. To escape this ultimate guilt, the bankrupts band to gether to commit a lesser crime: hold up a bank.

Maloney, a light novelist with a heavy hand (Daily Bread, The 24-Hour Drink Book), can write dialogue that gets off the train at Westport. He can compose scenes that seem to come from a camera rather than a type writer. He makes superb use of his country club to write a short history of the decline and fall of the snob in America. But he shows no faith in his material. Just when he should be putting it all together, he takes it all apart, hurrying on to play a stand-up comedian in print -- he becomes an anything-for-a-laugh gagster, spouting Mafia jokes, even a little garment industry humor, too.

Like too many American comic novelists, Maloney seems to lack self-respect. The Nixon Recession Caper is a reasonably funny -- and unreasonably tame -- piece of what gets called high jinks. May it prove successful enough to give Maloney the confidence to write the wild and offensive novel he is capable of.

qedMelvin Maddocks

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