The Biggest Arena

By Ed Magnuson

CIRCLES: A WASHINGTON STORY by ABIGAIL MCCARTHY 251 pages. Doubleday.$7.95.

There was Joseph and Mary and Gene. Now there is Abigail. It is not at all likely that the long-separated wife of former Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy will ever gain the fame, or notoriety, of those other American McCarthys. But in her own gentle way. Abigail McCarthy is making a deserved and distinctive name for herself as the most perceptive analyst of the precarious role of women in the male-dominated world of U.S. politics. First in her well-crafted autobiography. Private Faces/Public Places, now in her slim first novel, Abigail McCarthy skillfully details the insecurities and ambiguities that tear at the women behind--or sometimes deftly leading--their public men.

Circles depicts more accurately than any male-authored Washington novel the social life by which politicians, journalists, lobbyists and bureaucrats converge in ways that profoundly affect the country's political course. In McCarthy's Washington, the women rarely manipulate men to influence policy; nor are they exploited by men to further masculine political careers. Mostly these women offer soothing sensitivities that allow ideas and personalities to merge across dinner tables with a minimum of friction. Sure, it's all a game, concedes Laura Talbert, a veteran hostess and one of McCarthy's leading characters. But the game is played "in the greatest arena of all, where the survival of humanity is at stake rather than, let us say, the competition of business interests. Think what Pittsburgh must be like!"

Neither the author nor her fictional women find that backstage role wholly satisfying. Bitsy Pryor, the efficient wife of a Democratic Senator, is appalled at the prospect that he may run for President in 1976; it would kill her budding career as a radio and TV advocate of women's rights. After 40 years in Washington, Miss Emily, wife of a retiring Senate chairman, is terrified at having to return to a home she no longer knows. Reporter Tiana Briggs, who turned her society column into solid news, aches for the son she lost in a broken marriage and laments the destructiveness of reporters in post-Watergate Washington. Alice Ann Nordahl. the normally subdued wife of a Senator, blossoms into a confident campaigner when he runs for President, but weeps over a childhood secret she kept from him. When his candidacy fails, she grows both closer to him and more self-reliant-- a resolution typical of the author's generally upbeat perspective.

Unnamed People. Under McCarthy's handling these woes do not turn into soap opera. She is a sharp and lucid observer. But she is so detached and dignified that the novel lacks fire. Her gentility dulls the effectiveness of a potentially enlivening technique: the difficult one of mixing real Washington characters with fictional ones. Such household names as Ed Muskie, Hubert Humphrey, Henry Jackson, Lady Bird Johnson, Judy Agnew, Betty Ford Rosalynn Carter-- and Gene McCarthy --move fleetingly through the story. All are portrayed in flattering terms.

The author saves her few barbs for unnamed people only Washington in siders will recognize. (Jimmy Carter, who won the campaign on which the story centers, is barely mentioned at all. ) Abigail McCarthy may lack a flair for the emotional, but she so clarifies the dilemma of today's political woman that even her male readers should understand-- and be moved.

Ed Magnuson

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.