Mud Pie Eaters

By John Skow

FIRST HUBBY by Roy Blount Jr. Villard; 286 pages; $18.95

Let's see. Marilyn Quayle, furious because George dumped Dan in '92, is over in Libya conspiring with Gaddafi. Gorby gave the U.S.S.R. his best shot, but it didn't work, so he defected, took a publishing job in Manhattan, and is dating Susan Sarandon. Noriega beat his drug rap, as we all knew he would, and is back in power in Panama. At the White House, President Clementine Fox is brooding about sending troops to dislodge him, and her peacenik husband Guy, the First Hubby, sourly tells her, "Have yourself a merry little isthmus." Got all that? Oh, yes, and Clementine became President when her running mate, the victorious Democratic candidate, was brained by a fish (no assassination, just a 13-lb. porgy ex machina sucked up by a waterspout and dumped on him by fate and a desperate author).

As a sitnov, First Hubby may be about three bricks shy of a load, which is the title of one of Roy Blount Jr.'s amiable volumes of uptown down-home humor. Still, Blount is good company whatever he's writing, even if his puns ("Li Pung lizards!" as a comment on Clementine's China policy) hit the wall and dribble down like tossed eggs. And even if some of the jokes are merely gags (he wants to make love, she has a headache, he's hurt, and she says no, a political headache: she has to fire the Defense Secretary). That is a lot of evens, evened out by an unexpected development, which is that the two main characters actually come to life and play a convincing love story. Clementine is charming but alarming, like most Presidents, and Guy, a writer blocked by prudence and the Secret Service, is rueful and funny. He successfully conveys his secret to the reader: why First Ladies' portraits look that way -- why Abigail Powers Fillmore, for instance, "looks like she has just been induced, for the good of the nation, to eat a dozen mud pies."