Fastmouth in Babylon

By John Skow

CIRCLE OF WOMEN by Drury L. Pifer. 335 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

Sometimes Novelist Pifer sneaks glances at his metaphors like a new-hatched press agent admiring his first pair of $60 shoes. But this boyishness is not offensive: he can write almost as well as he thinks he can.

Pifer's literary fancy is a ring of courtesans organized by a shadowy group of sinners to pry cashable secrets out of the military-industrial complex. His hero is a plausible young fastmouth, Tom Habba-kuk--named somewhat pretentiously after a 7th century B.C. minor prophet --who has been recruited to shill for the vestals, as the girls are called. He turns out to be very good at his job.

Pifer puts it this way: "When morning comes with the soldiery abed and tangled in a heap, the bathtub gin drained, leaving only a rosy residue of secretaries in half-slips, when the muddy colonel in the geranium bush is dragged indoors by dawn's first Negro to sleep it off in the vestibule under a smashed grandfather clock, when first brightness crashes through ripped drapes into the dehydrated eyes of snockered politicos, lobbyists in underpants, Pentagon sources and the secret police, when the hands that guide our collective destiny reach to kill the screams of the alarm clock and grope for the girl (already fled), at that hour Habbakuk is pushing aside the rind of his grapefruit, sipping the dregs of his coffee, and rereading the telegram that sends him flying to New York by cocktail time, where he must perforce plug in his connections, drop his names, jiggle through a dance or two till he's in a position to float Valerie Corday onstage and steal away, leaving her twirling and whirling in a canned atmosphere of chatter and light."

Through all of this lush verbal growth, doubt comes creeping toward the reader. What Pifer is up to is no mere suspense story. Somewhat in the manner of Richard Condon, he intends a demolishing burlesque of the big-buck sector of U.S. society. Some of his touches are good. He knows, for instance, the precise frequencies at which high-salaried underlings twitch in the presence of heavy money. He can show two flacks of opposed allegiance snicking at each other with unsheathed falsehoods, and trace the exact grimace of the loser.

Yet much is wrong, even with Pifer's attack. An early clue is that a good deal of the author's satire of American manners has the unmistakable staleness of frozen dogma. "The American businessman who takes his wife to dinner is in trouble if he's in Europe. He can't follow the conversation. Rodin, Caravageio, Proudhon, who the hell are they?" This is like mocking the tail fins on American cars. It would be entirely possible to write a damaging satire of U.S. businessmen in Europe, but they don't have tail fins any more, and their wives serve up Caravaggio's chiaroscuro on Triscuits.

. John Skow

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