Good Bad & Bad Bad

A FREE AGENT (318 pp.)--Frederic Wakeman--Simon & Schuster ($4.95).

Critics will never admit it, and the reader's good sense denies it, but sometimes bad writing is best. Good writing would never have produced Eliza crossing the ice. Scarlet and Rhett. Ivanhoe. Amber, James Bond, Arrowsmith, Queeg's ball bearings, or any of the Bobbsey twins. The best and most enjoyable bad writing ever done by an American is Hemingway's in To Have and Have Not, but when some anthologist pastes together the definitive collection of Great Moments from Bad Novels, he should give a secondary dedication, at least, to Frederic Wakeman.

It was Wakeman, in The Hucksters, who began the Madison Avenue genre, but none of Wakeman's imitators approached him for Great Moments. There were three genuine Moments in the book: the first when Victor Norman--Hamlet as hid den persuader--threw away his black knit necktie and bought a sincere $35 hand-painted number on the way to a job interview; the second when Norman, newly hired as an account executive at $35,000 per, amusedly dropped $8 out of his office window; and the third when Norman watched his client. Evan Llewelyn Evans, spit on the boardroom table to illustrate a point in mnemonics. There was nothing much to the rest of The Hucksters, and there didn't need to be.

If Wakeman had dropped from sight after The Hucksters, he might have been remembered as the Jack London of Manhattan's midtown. Instead, he kept on turning out novels, risking the law of averages. A Free Agent is the worst of a dreary descent. The author has lost his knack of writing badly well. Worse news, the hero is not world-wise but incredibly doltish, even allowing for the fact that he is supposed to be some kind of intelligence agent.

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