Radical Surgery

Concerned that the new Soviet leader's popularity will threaten the United States' permanent war economy, the U.S. President finds his fears dissolved by a series of shocking assassinations of prominent Americans

Markfield's ( To an Early Grave ) satire of de-Stalinization presents a charismatic Pavel Gavrych, risen to power in the U.S.S.R. and reaching out to the U.S. in amity in 1993. As a new American president agonizes about dismantling 50 years of a wartime economy, his powerful aide Harry Porlock devises a scheme to have the terminally ill commit heinous terrorist acts ostensibly directed by Gavrych. The book ends with a new red scare in the U.S. and a re-Stalinization of Russia. Among other inanities, the hyperbolic political takeoff features the nameless president's internal dialogues with JFK, who sports a stage-Irish brogue; a first lady as a sex-crazed twit; a precocious nymphet as part of the president's inner circle. With the president's understanding of American as "the hoi, the polloi, the louts and lumps, eating and drinking their fill at some great American trough and moving in multitudes from sea to shining sea," this tale falls somewhere between Joseph Heller and Richard Condon. Mostly it just falls.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Satirist and magazine writer Markfield, whose You Could Live If They Let You (1974) put a Jewish president and a lot of one- liners into the White House, puts a syntax thrasher in the same spot and an absurdist in the Kremlin. Situation outweighs plot in this densely written, relentlessly sardonic sendup of presidents and geopolitics. The situation is the ascension to Soviet power of Pavel Gavrych, whose pure and burning teenage devotion to Marxism/Leninism as practiced in the Workers' Paradise came face to face with the cruelty of Uncle Joe Stalin in a personal meeting in which the generalissimo dislocated the lad's thumbs to show him the way of the world. Forty years later Gavrych turns Soviet communism on its ear by unleashing the most bizarre inherent forces of central planning and authority. The upshot is a totally confused state no longer inimical to the West--as a result of which America's gabbling, dreamy President panics, seeing no role for himself in a tension-free world. With the President's blessing, Harry Porlock, a scheming National Security type, sets out to undo the damage wrought by peace with a series of bloody terrorist incidents that seems to have been triggered by old- fashioned, treacherous American communists. Bloomingdale's and Radio City Music Hall take hard hits, as does a magazine awfully like Time. Very heavy going and never quite as amazing--or even as amusing--as the reality of the past several years. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A dark satire, this depicts the chaos that develops after a Russian political reformer and his message "Peace, Sympathy, Brotherhood and Purest Joy" cause a mass transformation in the Soviet psyche. His influence is mistrusted and feared at the highest U.S. levels, lest it spawn an unwelcome easing of international tension or domestic social flux. Horrendous "dirty trick" bombings and killings by phony devotees of the benign Russian are staged to whip up hatred and anger and discredit the growing movement. A weak U.S. president lost in his thoughts and obsessed with his declining popularity allows the carnage and trickery. Various half-baked and absurd characters add to the mix of ideas, issues, and cynicism that, along with the enigmatic plot, will provoke thought, shock, and some amusement. Briskly told, this novel by a satirist whose books appeared in the 1960s and 1970s is troubling, antic, and absorbing. Recommended.
- William A. Donovan, Chicago P.L.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.