Word: macguffin
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...MACGUFFIN by Stanley Elkin (Simon & Schuster; 283 pages; $19.95). Bobbo Druff, 58, is a washed-up pol serving time as city commissioner of streets in a minor-league U.S. metropolis. His wife of 36 years is going deaf; his son Mikey, 30, still lives at home; and his health -- after a heart bypass, four instances of a collapsed lung and extensive circulatory problems in his legs -- is not robust. Understandably he concludes that the "world is getting away from me, I think...
...invents a MacGuffin, the term Alfred Hitchcock used to describe anything that gives spurious meaning to a plot, or, as Bobbo explains, "whatever got slipped into Cary Grant's pocket without his knowledge or that Jimmy Stewart picked up by mistake when the girl switched briefcases on him." The MacGuffin that Bobbo comes up with is a conspiracy to get rid of him that involves everyone from his bosses to his son's deceased Lebanese girlfriend to his limousine drivers...
...also gave them grownup female allies. Poor Richard has to make do with disco-bopping Michele (Emmanuelle Seigner), who is every father figure's nightmare. She is an amiable girl, but without common sense or discernible attention span. It is she, vaporishly bearing Frantic's MacGuffin, who mixes up her bag with the Walkers' luggage at the airport, thus starting off all their troubles...
Even so, Archer is a master entertainer, and on the trail he produces one of the best MacGuffins of recent popular fiction. (MacGuffin was Alfred Hitchcock's name for the object or secret that sets the plot churning.) The time is 1966, and Soviet Chairman Leonid Brezhnev, no less, is trying desperately to find a famous icon spirited away from the Winter Palace in the last days of the Czar. It passed through the hands of the Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goring, who gave it to Scott's father, his jailer after World War II. The late Scott Sr., in turn...
...icon itself, though valuable, is merely the box that contains the MacGuffin, an astonishing and unsuspected 19th century document. It seems that in 1867, when the world thought that Russia had sold a certain large piece of real estate to a young Western power for $7 million, what was really signed (and nicknamed Seward's folly) was only a 99-year lease. A crucial clause allows the Soviet Union to reclaim its property by paying a large sum in gold before the lease expires. Brezhnev, a stonehearted landlord, rubs his hands and plots eviction. Will Scott and the female bass...