Scorn Syrup

By John Skow

Richard Dooling is impartially derisive in his caustic second novel, White Man's Grave (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 386 pages; $22). He chucks a custard pie at every face that shows itself. There's Randall Killigan, an Indianapolis attorney who glories in the dismemberment allowed by bankruptcy law: the wrenching of great financial chunks from the carcasses of not-quite-dead companies. And there's young Boone Westfall, newly employed to reject legitimate claims at his father's sleazy insurance company. "Why do you think they call it work?" Dad asks, when Boone objects that cheating widows and orphans is tedious.

But Dooling is only warming up. It seems that Killigan's son Michael, Boone's idealistic friend, has gone missing while on Peace Corps duty in Sierra Leone. The scene shifts to the African outback, and the reader worries for a chapter or two that Dooling intends to serve up the traditional wise and ! mysterious natives of white-man-in-Africa fiction who look on gravely as the palefaces disintegrate.

Nope. The whites do fall apart, but the black politicians, thugs and businessmen they encounter are just as inventively corrupt as any alderman back in Indiana. At one point a wily middleman recommends that Boone employ a seer. Are his visions guaranteed to be accurate? Errors do occur, it is admitted. "What if a devil or a witch or an angry ancestor interferes with the divination process for its own purposes, maybe to mislead the client with a false message?" What if, indeed? The author's fizz of comic energy is as wild and scornful as Richard Condon's, back when Condon was young and frisky. And as was true with such daft Condon fables as Some Angry Angel, Dooling's story has no detectable point or purpose, except to marvel at the rich variety of human wickedness.