A Generation of Vipers THE RED WHITE AND BLUE

By R.Z. Sheppard

Having sharpened his teeth on True Confessions and Dutch Shea, Jr., John Gregory Dunne now takes the "big bite," Mailerese for manly portions of theme and experience. The Red White and Blue even has some of the portentous overtones of Mailer's An American Dream, and like the Champ, Dunne has an acute sense of evil and a highly developed sniffer for the hydrants of power. He is also wickedly funny, if your taste runs to hilarious funerals, jocular murder trials and droll executions: "The warden and I had the prime rib. Yorkshire pudding and strawberry shortcake . . . Last meals. It would make a hell of a cookbook."

One of the author's favorite words is "segue," an old music term, now used freely in the movie business. It means to move smoothly and without hesitation from one element to another. The Red White and Blue, in fact, segues from the radical politics of the '60s to Viet Nam to the bloodless take-over of the nation by a communications culture in which concepts of image and credibility have become acceptable alternatives for substance and truth.

Dunne's is a cold, cruel and murderous world observed from an emotional distance. "I am by disposition one of life's neutrals, a human Switzerland," says Jack Broderick, the novel's woeful narrator. He combines the characteristics of a disillusioned moralist with the casualness of an old- fashioned remittance man. A $10 million trust fund from his billionaire father allows him to play at making a living, if not a life.

Sometimes Broderick is a San Francisco newspaper columnist who roams the city looking for human-interest stories. His father, whose holdings include the paper, does not approve: "The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker -- you're very tight with that whole bunch of deadbeats now, aren't you?" Sometimes Jack is a Hollywood scriptwriter, and the bunch is livelier: Producer Marty Magnin, "reeking of Pinaud Lime Sec cologne . . . his shirt open four buttons down . . . beads of sweat around the plugs of his hair transplant"; Las Vegas Club Performer Buddy Seville, formerly Buddy Singapore and before that, Sandy Cairo; a collection of film folk and pool lizards for whom sex is merely foreplay for gossip.

Broderick works best as a culture buzzard, circling scenes of death and derangement, identifying choice morsels by stripe and cry. His range includes a wide variety of wildlife: a condemned murderer named Germany Baker, a radical feminist with a wardrobe of obscene T shirts, an ambitious, self- absorbed television newswoman, black and Hispanic militants, limousine , liberals and Fritz Finn, President of the U.S., who has had an affair with Broderick's late sister. Jack's brother Augustine, affectionately known throughout the world as Bro, is a Benedictine priest with 14 honorary degrees, a 43-line entry in Who's Who and entree to Fidel and the Pope. One of Jack's ex-wives, Leah Kaye, is a left-wing lawyer who defends brutish killers as victims of the pig establishment and has a mouth like a Kalashnikov on full automatic. Recalls Broderick: "Bed was where she held forth on genocide and Yanqui imperialism and racism and political prisoners and Amerika with a k, each topic an aphrodisiac in itself. There was seldom any postcoital tristesse."

Bro's and Leah's splashy assassinations at the hands of a crazed Viet Nam veteran are a navigational point in Broderick's looping narrative. His delivery owes something to Raymond Chandler, but rather than plot there is a proliferation of character and incident that builds to an ugly and violent mood. Dunne is a masterly setter of scenes and a merciless satirist, whether the target is an incontinent captain of industry or a criminal who has been packaged as a black revolutionary and needs an investment adviser: "The Merc and I were thinking more along the lines of Ornstein and Shay. Tax specialists . . . Estate planning. Top litigators. On the civil side, of course."

The Red White and Blue is an excellent example of Randall Jarrell's definition of the novel as a long narrative that has something wrong with it. Tightly made in its parts, the book sags as a whole. Dunne, a journalist and, with Wife Joan Didion, writer of such filmscripts as A Star Is Born and True Confessions, seems to have put his notebooks, filing cabinet and even his sock drawer to good use. His descriptions of courtrooms and Hollywood living rooms suggest nimble legwork and a fine ear. Agent to agent: "You can say what you want about communism, but those boys know how to structure a deal." A caterer on the subject of specialty bar mitzvahs: " 'Mr. Wonderful' is one of our biggest themes . . . Of the traditional variety. Top hat, white gloves." There are even old jokes. Broderick: "What's real money to the rich? she would ask. Usually in bed. A dollar ninety-eight, I would say. Talk of money always made me uncomfortable."

Now, that really is rich, coming from a character who is completely at ease gabbing about his wife's gynecological problems, body dumps in Central America and the step-by-step procedure of killing a man in the gas chamber.