Books in Brief: Facing the Lions

Facing the Lions, by Tom Wicker (Viking, 432 pp., $7.95). Take a wooden stick of a fictional senator and have him hold nationally televised hearings on the condition of migrant workers. Then pretend that Americans are so electrified by the hearings that the senator is catapulted into contention for the Presidency. Throw in a sexy wife who sleeps around for political reasons and add a bunch of standard Southern politicians. Stir in thousands of irrelevant details and some stock sex scenes. Then strain it all through the consciousness of an incredibly introspective, emotional, skirt-chasing, Southern expatriate newsman who seems afflicted with a severe case of male menopause. The result: another suety study of power and politics in Washington, too slavishly respectful of the conventions of fiction. A fat book, at least two hundred pages overweight.

JC

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J. R. Coyne Jr.

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Facing the Lions, by Tom Wicker (Viking, 432 pp., $7.95). Take a wooden stick of a fictional senator and have him hold nationally televised hearings on the condition of migrant workers. Then pretend that Americans are so electrified by the hearings that the senator is catapulted into contention for the Presidency. Throw in a sexy wife who sleeps around for political reasons and add a bunch of standard Southern politicians. Stir in thousands of irrelevant details and some stock sex scenes. Then strain it all through the consciousness of an incredibly introspective, emotional, skirt-chasing, Southern expatriate newsman who seems afflicted with a severe case of male menopause. The result: another suety study of power and politics in Washington, too slavishly respectful of the conventions of fiction. A fat book, at least two hundred pages overweight.