Books in Brief: Stryker

Stryker, by Chuck Scarborough (Macmillan, 280 pp., $8.95). NBC New York anchorman Chuck Scarborough, a fourtime local Emmy winner, has found time in between reading the news to Gotham to write a sly, chilling novel about politics and television and the connecting links between them. Ben Stryker, a Dan Ratherish character who went one step too far and swore at President Nixon one trying afternoon is pulled off the White House beat and assigned to blood-and-guts cases in New York. His loathing of Nixon jibes nicely with his boss’s (the Chairman’s) loathing of Agnew, who (it will be remembered by antiquarians) dared nine years ago to initiate an assault on the power of the television networks. Stryker’s progressive decline into monomania works beautifully to satisfy the desires of his employers, and in this wonderfully cynical novel the intertwining conspiracies serve perfectly to explain Nixon’s bizarre behavior after the Watergate revelations began to undo his Presidency. Scarborough has tossed in a little sadistic sex, a dollop of more conventional coupling, and a minor peek into one subsidiary character’s sexual closet, and some of this actually serves to advance the plot. Most of it, however, is gratuitous, and unsavory as well. But the central theme is intriguing; Scarborough’s writing is many, many cuts above what the man is obliged to read at New Yorkers nightly from the tube; and this first novel demonstrates an ability that will serve the author well when and if he, like his protagonist, is no longer useful to the sachems of his industry.

DB

About the Author

David Brudnoy

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Stryker, by Chuck Scarborough (Macmillan, 280 pp., $8.95). NBC New York anchorman Chuck Scarborough, a fourtime local Emmy winner, has found time in between reading the news to Gotham to write a sly, chilling novel about politics and television and the connecting links between them. Ben Stryker, a Dan Ratherish character who went one step too far and swore at President Nixon one trying afternoon is pulled off the White House beat and assigned to blood-and-guts cases in New York. His loathing of Nixon jibes nicely with his boss’s (the Chairman’s) loathing of Agnew, who (it will be remembered by antiquarians) dared nine years ago to initiate an assault on the power of the television networks. Stryker’s progressive decline into monomania works beautifully to satisfy the desires of his employers, and in this wonderfully cynical novel the intertwining conspiracies serve perfectly to explain Nixon’s bizarre behavior after the Watergate revelations began to undo his Presidency. Scarborough has tossed in a little sadistic sex, a dollop of more conventional coupling, and a minor peek into one subsidiary character’s sexual closet, and some of this actually serves to advance the plot. Most of it, however, is gratuitous, and unsavory as well. But the central theme is intriguing; Scarborough’s writing is many, many cuts above what the man is obliged to read at New Yorkers nightly from the tube; and this first novel demonstrates an ability that will serve the author well when and if he, like his protagonist, is no longer useful to the sachems of his industry.