F E A T U R E The artist of death By Gary Kamiya In "Explaining Hitler," Ron Rosenbaum brilliantly explores the unfathomable origins of history's greatest evil (06/30/98) B O O K C A S E A new service for book lovers R E C E N T L Y Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon By Joe Queenan Nonfiction (07/15/98) Misadventures in the (213) By Dennis Hensley Fiction (07/14/98) Mr. Mike: The Life and Work of Michael O'Donoghue By Dennis Perrin Nonfiction (07/13/98) A Conspiracy of Tall Men By Noah Hawley Fiction (07/10/98) Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs By Caroline Knapp Nonfiction (07/09/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SEARCH REVIEWS BY: title of book author publisher reviewer - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		_________l u c k y_B.a s t a r d BY CHARLES McCARRY RANDOM HOUSE FICTION 384 PAGES BY HAL HINSON | Being a writer of political fiction can't be easy in 1998. Not only did the Berlin Wall come down, bringing the Cold War to a screeching halt and practically wiping out your whole raison d'être in one fell swoop, but on any given news day, the plain truth is not only far stranger than fiction, it's downright surreal, driving most writers to the outer limits of their imagination just to keep up. On the other hand, Charles McCarry, who with such books as "Shelley's Heart" and "The Secret Lovers" has established himself as one of the most provocative and sharp-edged writers of contemporary political fiction, seems to have accepted these post-Cold War realities as a challenge, as an opportunity to entertain his wildest fancies. In his latest novel, "Lucky Bastard," he's done exactly that: thrown caution to the winds and created a story that is sexy, unpredictable and extravagantly imaginative without ever losing the ring of recognizable truth. If in the process McCarry manages to make playful, naughty fun of some of contemporary American culture's most sacred myths, then all the better. What if, McCarry boldly asks, one of our most cherished (and martyred) ex-presidents, during the course of one of his fabled departures from the straight-and-narrow, were to have fathered an illegitimate son? And what if that son -- who possesses some of his father's most famous (and some of his most notorious) traits -- were to seek out for himself a career in politics, rising first to state attorney general, then lieutenant governor, then governor, and then ... beyond? His name is Jack Adams -- or rather, John Fitzgerald Adams -- and, as he tells it, his mother, who was at the time a member of the Navy Nurse Corps, met a certain young Navy officer in a San Francisco hospital shortly after a Japanese destroyer smashed into his PT boat in the Pacific. The window of opportunity was brief, but the young officer's injuries were not so severe that he missed it. Twenty-one years later, the product of that quick tryst surfaces on history's radar as a student at Columbia with skills as a politician that are characterized as a "natural talent, flowing straight from the unconscious." This talent is part of the luck referred to in the book's title. But it goes beyond that to a kind of genius for studying people, for finding out what they want and "making them believe he was giving it to them even when he wasn't." This uncanny knack for making others like him and trust him is the prime component of the character's unfathomable good luck. (It's a characteristic he shares with another political Jack -- the candidate in "Primary Colors.") McCarry also asks us to consider what might happen if Jack, while clawing his way to the top of the political heap, were to somehow come to the attention of an agent from Soviet intelligence who sees the young American as a chance to realize "the ultimate dream of the KGB" -- to see an agent of the Soviet government elected as the president of the United States. To accomplish this, the agent must take advantage of yet another aspect of Jack's personality that he inherited from his father -- "an aura of sexual glamour" matched in intensity only by a voracious sexual appetite that is both the driving force behind his irresistible charm and, ultimately, the engine of his undoing. Clearly, McCarry intends for this last aspect of Jack's character to be Kennedy-esque. But this scenario also applies to a more contemporary political figure who also seems to suffer from a "zipper problem"; someone who has himself been described both in his politics and his many reported excesses as the bastard child of JFK. McCarry's shrewdness and skill are evident in the way he has orchestrated these character traits so that they have a sort of double resonance, echoing off the Kennedy legend while also functioning as a rousing absurdist riff on Clintonian politics. If, in all this, McCarry is essentially realistic, he is by no means straight-faced. In this regard, he has more in common with Richard Condon than with John Le Carré. A keen sense of proportion guides even McCarry's most outrageous flights. He may tease the boundaries of plausibility, but never so much that his wit loses its potency. It's a cynical, cut-throat world that he's created here, a place where no weakness goes unexploited and no good deed goes unpunished. SALON | July 16, 1998 Hal Hinson, who lives in Washington, is a former film critic for the Washington Post.