Word: condonable
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ARIGATO by Richard Condon. 312 pages. Dial Press...
Fastidious distaste for fellow human beings is no hindrance to headwaiters and lighthouse keepers. It can be a positive asset for a man in the comic-novel industry. But Richard Condon, whose extraordinary talent for comedy produced The Manchurian Candidate, has developed this asset to the point of unproductive excess. In such recent novels as Mile High and The Vertical Smile he has simply refused to direct his attention toward anything that vaguely resembles a member of the human race...
Well, why not is that Condon can't mention any character's irrelevant off-stage aunt without adding that she holds the world's record (2,164) for reading detective stories in a single year. The hero, a cashiered British navy captain, can't simply have a pretty French mistress with a thuggish father; she must be a Renoir nude and he the head of the Mafia in Marseilles. The captain's wife can't merely be rich and willful; she must run an investment program for the most powerful family...
...threw it aside -and now, in a stroke of historical irony, seems to have given it one of its biggest revitalizations ever. For nine days, some 62 all-stars and more than 500 sidemen-from Duke Ellington to Charlie Byrd, from Dizzy Gillespie to Roberta Flack, from Eddie Condon to Sonny Rollins-wailed through 30 concerts in eleven various settings (range: 300 seats to 32,000). When it was all over, more than 100,000 jazz buffs had paid a total of $500,000 to listen to a music that more than a foolish few had considered dead years...
...face that invites caricature. But lately the lampooning of the President has expanded far beyond the cartoonist's drawing board and become a minor genre of the arts. Documentary Film Maker Emile de Antonio has compiled MilLHouse (TIME, Oct. 18), a wickedly derisive splicing of Nixoniana. Novelist Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate) has come forth with The Vertical Smile, a politico-sexual farce whose hero, Duncan Mulligan, is a Wall Street lawyer, transvestite and presidential candidate known, lest anyone miss the point, as "Funky Dune...