Word: condonable
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Born. To Marguerite Piazza, 34. onetime Metropolitan Opera nightingale turned supper-club thrush, and William James Condon, 49, a Tennessee snuff-company executive: their third child (ber fifth), second daughter; in Memphis...
SOME ANGRY ANGEL, by Richard Condon (275 pp.; McGraw-Hill; $4.50), marks the third appearance of an ironist whose iron holds a keener edge than most. After his fine, mordant first novel. The Oldest Confession, he did a few handstands to attract attention, and the result was The Manchurian Candidate (TIME, July 6). an impressively comic but chaotic novel whose message-all is vanity and venality, and even the noblest of men knows not the way to the washroom-was not always audible over the author's sousaphone accompaniment. The present book appears to contain the same admonition, though...
...lose his soul, and the author to misplace both humor and control of his figures of speech. "While it dipped its pen in its readers' blood." he preaches, "the newspaper industry mumbled on about its sacred right, freedom of the press, and then gutted that right." To Condon fans, the book's redeeming feature will be some grimly comic episodes: the concessionaire who, as crowds watch a would-be suicide, does a brisk business in "JUMP" and "DON'T JUMP" signs; or the drunken and thoroughly fraudulent hero of the Battle of Britain who solemnly praises...
...Pavlov Route. Man's fate, as Condon sees it, is to work hard, sacrifice much, lead an intelligent, just and fruitful life, and then show up at the Last Judgment minus his pants. Sooner or "later, like the blind beggars toppling after their blind leader in Bruegel's chillingly ironic painting, all the author's characters stumble into the ditch of mortality. Satirist Condon is not afraid to set up outrageously improbable situations to achieve his effects. In his first novel, The Oldest Confession (1958), an Achilles among criminals was brought to heel while trying to hijack...
...effort at global satire proves too strenuous. In spite of a climax as apocalyptic as any since King Kong was shot off the top of the Empire State Building, Author Condon falters as he battles both cold-war antagonists simultaneously. But in his comic set pieces, he is wickedly skillful. The book's most memorable incident reveals the true story of the Senator's battle scar. Stationed in Greenland, far from the smell of gunpowder but also far from any American women, the legislator-to-be seeks out the sealskinned houris of an Eskimo camp. A fight starts...