To Launch a President

To Launch a President, by Michael Ruland (Vantage, 259 pp., $6.95). It’s early 1972, flotation time for would-be Presidents, and this crowd is testing the waters with Senator (formerly General) Sven Ericksen. The cast of characters Mr. Ruland has assembled to launch his President would have trouble floating Donald Duck: a liberal columnist past his prime and his office staff, a gay photographer living with the nymphomaniac former wife of an almost-reformed New Left writer, a Trotskyist-turned-hard-anti-Communist, a very recent Czech defector who falls in love with the columnist’s wife who is having an affair with the Senator. No one is overly talented or dedicated and as for discretion, it’s like, man, nowhere. Mr. Ruland is obviously more interested in making some rather sophisticated political points than in writing a good novel, but perhaps because his characters are so outre, what he’s come up with is high camp Allen Drury, a political divertissement.

PL

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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To Launch a President, by Michael Ruland (Vantage, 259 pp., $6.95). It’s early 1972, flotation time for would-be Presidents, and this crowd is testing the waters with Senator (formerly General) Sven Ericksen. The cast of characters Mr. Ruland has assembled to launch his President would have trouble floating Donald Duck: a liberal columnist past his prime and his office staff, a gay photographer living with the nymphomaniac former wife of an almost-reformed New Left writer, a Trotskyist-turned-hard-anti-Communist, a very recent Czech defector who falls in love with the columnist’s wife who is having an affair with the Senator. No one is overly talented or dedicated and as for discretion, it’s like, man, nowhere. Mr. Ruland is obviously more interested in making some rather sophisticated political points than in writing a good novel, but perhaps because his characters are so outre, what he’s come up with is high camp Allen Drury, a political divertissement.