Book Review : The Woes and Pratfalls of a Reluctant Oval Office Aide

Q Clearance by Peter Benchley (Random House $16.95)

From line one to Page 172, “Q Clearance” is a prime example of that vanishing literary species, the comic novel. Though the predatory forces of slapstick advance upon it and eventually close in, that’s the hazard of the satirist’s risky trade. Where do you go from hilarious? Up leads to absurdity; down goes directly to disappointment. Faced with that choice, absurdity is more fun.

Timothy Burnham is a presidential speech writer, toiling for a post-Reagan chief executive who exhibits the more bizarre personality quirks of every President since Truman, though his use of the language is Johnsonian. President Ben Winslow favors barnyard epigrams, bathroom metaphors and euphemisms with more impact than the real thing.

When Burnham imagines himself being asked “What’s your job?” his answer is “ventriloquist to the President.” At the beginning of the novel, Burnham’s position is not nearly so exalted. He’s but one of many junior writers, “a tool, to be paid no more homage than an artist accords his brush or a carpenter his screwdriver.”

His pleasant obscurity ends abruptly when he’s granted Q clearance, a dubious benefit accompanying a routine elevation in his civil service grade. Q clearance means Burnham will henceforth be sent top secret documents pertaining to atomic energy, which he must read and destroy. When he attempts to decline the rights, duties and footling raise of $48.17 accompanying his new classification, he’s told he has no power of veto. The move from GS-15 step 8 to GS-15 step 9 is automatic, involuntary and irreversible.

No Inkling

Although Burnham has no inkling of what Q clearance will do to him professionally, he knows his private life is bound to deteriorate. Uncomfortably married to a woman whose radical political convictions have not moved one iota toward the center since 1968, Burnham must also contend with a 12-year-old Maoist daughter and a younger son who has already adopted his mother’s and sister’s inflexible attitudes.

If that weren’t enough to blight a life, Burnham suffers from multiple allergies and a recurrent drinking problem, both aggravated by the general contempt of his wife and children. “You’re an extension of That Man,” his wife says, to which Burnham’s reply is “No, I’m not. I’m a flunky.” Incompatibility doesn’t begin to convey the tension of their relationship, but because “Q Clearance” is a satire, you can laugh at Burnham’s plight with only slight twinges of guilt.

Of the other characters, only Ivy Peniston, a cleaning woman with an arthritic leg, seems meant to arouse any compassion. But Ivy doesn’t need our sympathy. She has something far more useful in her friend Mr. Pym, a Washington caterer who takes a special, quixotic interest in humble people like Ivy, but only if they are in a position to offer him “the funny offbeat things” that happen in the course of their daily work around the seats of power.

Mr. Pym, whose real name is Fyodor Michaelovitch Pinsky, functions as a guardian angel to the Ivy Penistons of the world, generous with his favors, asking practically nothing in return. Even scraps from a White House wastebasket delight him. When Ivy thinks about her benefactor’s eccentricity, she decides he’s a kind of social scientist, though in her heart she knows better.

Pym has already done some extraordinarily kind things for Ivy, and when she needs a high school diploma for her brilliant but nonconformist son Jerome, she approaches Pym again, a creaky literary device needed to set the rest of the story in motion. By then, after a series of serendipitous accidents, Burnham has become the President’s favorite spokesman. Newly conspicuous, he easily attracts the attention of Pym’s beautiful daughter Eva, who not only adores her father but owes him $16,000 in legal fees, circumstances tending to increase normal filial loyalty. When Burnham, the reluctant Q clearee, meets and falls in love with the alluring Eva, the pace of the novel quickens considerably.

Though Peter Benchley may not be in John Le Carre’s league as a writer of espionage thrillers, he’s clearly in a class with other Benchleys as a humorist, which, in some circles, carries equal weight. The charm of “Q Clearance” is neither in its contrived plot nor in its obligatory and half-hearted scenes of violence, but in its merciless sendup of various bureaucrats easily recognizable to anyone who reached the age of reason during the past four administrations. Admirers of “Jaws” may even find some provocative parallels between that novel and this one. If Benchley’s first beach book made you afraid to go into the water, this summer’s variation could stop you dead at the polling booth.