THE RETURN OF RICHARD NIXON And Other Essays <i> by Gregory McNamee (Harbinger House, 2802 N. Alvernon Way, Tucson, AZ 85712: $9.95; 213 pp.) </i>

Gregory McNamee’s essays--many of them book reviews published in such journals as the Bloomsbury Review--all center on a sense that the chaos of our times must be related to the fact that our century is coming to an end.

Richard Nixon functions in McNamee’s vision of America as a central icon of absurdity, proof positive that anything is possible when the world makes no sense. He begins his collection with a list of horrors that seem commonplace: In Hiroshima, for example, “a MacDonald’s hamburger restaurant has newly opened where a hundred and thirty thousand skeletons once burned.” The culmination of the list: “And Richard Nixon has emerged again to roam freely across the fin-de-siecle landscape, proclaiming himself our senior statesman, evidence enough that vampires do indeed exist.”

Most of McNamee’s essays concern symbols and icons of our time, and it is their hold over the imagination that preoccupies him. One essay discusses the uncanny hidden political power of Howard Hughes (who called Nixon “our boy in the White House”). Other subjects include Orwell, Hemingway, Reagan (“Ronnie Dearest”) and the youngest bank robber in American history.

McNamee’s essays are a hit-or-miss affair, but one utterly compelling reason to own this book--much as we hate to recommend this motivation for buying literature--is the cover, which features a most surprising 1967 black-and-white photograph of Nixon by Phillippe Halsman. Nixon is seated at a piano, gazing heavenward with a look of rapture; his hands, lifting from the keys in a graceful curve, seem just to have completed an ethereal, romantic phrase. On the back of the upright piano stands a pair of candles in classic brass candlesticks, and over the musician’s head in the background are two of the kitschiest, constructed-fish wall-hangings imaginable. It is a powerful image: The uncharacteristic but absolutely recognizable picture underlines Nixon’s complex meaning for so many Americans--and seems to provide McNamee’s diverse essays with a mysterious coherence and depth that the volume might otherwise have lacked.