BOOK REVIEW : Political Consultant Turns His Attention to a Novel Endeavor : COTTONWOOD, <i> by Raymond Strother</i> , Dutton, $18.95, 288 pages

“Cottonwood” is a novel that crawls with malice, wades in malice, is larded with malice. It flings out settled scores like a crabby porcupine with an excess of quills. It seethes with general ill feeling and a lively dislike of both men and women. It’s terribly funny.

Raymond Strother is not a novelist, exactly. His usual career is political consultant--at least that was his career. His last notable gig was as media consultant to Gary Hart (Mr. Monkey Business), and Mr. Hart is saluted in the dedication as “an intellectual companion and a friend.” But Strother has had a hand in the election of plenty of our American politicians, and he worked for a good while in Louisiana.

This particular story is not about that self-destructive charmer, Mr. Hart--though a boatful of “Sweeties” does figure prominently in the story--but about Southern politics, Democratic politics, the statesmanship of the down-and-out and the dispossessed. While up in Maine, this author suggests, well-dressed scoundrels are sipping iced martinis and playing horseshoes and taking “power walks” along the freezing beach, there’s another set of scoundrels down South (or they could be anywhere) swilling cases of Four Roses straight out of half-pint bottles, smoking marijuana until they can’t see you and you can’t see them for all the clouds of smoke.

Preachers who used to be rock ‘n’ roll musicians are preaching mightily for the candidates of their choice, and the landscape abounds with Sweeties, the darling 19-year-old kind, the born-again kind, the cheerful prostitute kind, and the 50-year-old kind who’ve spent a fortune on getting their sagging bodies tucked and stitched and stuffed--and they’re not ready to give up the game yet--not for another 30 years, at least.

So, one thing Strother is saying is: You don’t have to be an East Coast preppie aristocrat to get ahead in American politics; you can be any old wino on the block--as long as you’ve got the right handlers. There are enough paper sacks full of hundred-dollar bills to go around for everybody! Whether that’s good or bad, the reader will have to decide.

“Cottonwood’s” premise is this: Sonny Christian Ahab Simmons was born of white trash in Louisiana and orphaned early. He grows up with a burning detestation of poverty and of being on the outside. He works his way through college and marries Darlene, who loves draperies and children in roughly that order. He has kids, goes broke, and falls in with Big Jim, a monumentally corrupt political maniac who orders up a fresh set of whores every two weeks, and can eat a whole pig at one sitting.

When their own United States senator gets caught flouncing about in a Washington, D.C., fountain with an aging Sweetie, Christian comes up with a good idea: There’s a pitiful hard-core drunk named Hugh Conklin who sells plastic donkeys (and gold elephants) to tourists at the State Capital--and then quietly goes to throw up in the bushes. Wouldn’t it be a hoot if they ran Hugh Conklin as a candidate for Louisiana’s Democratic senator? If Christian can only manage to get him to run fourth out of a field of 10, and if Big Jim places a zillion statewide bets on this filthy bum, they’ll all get filthy rich!

The plot follows Conklin’s campaign. That plot is as scathing as it can possibly be. The cadre of low-life addicts and punch-drunk boxers and African-American gang members represent the very bottom of American life. (At least I hope it’s the bottom; I’d hate to see if there’s anything underneath it.) Christian, depressed man of the future, puts together brilliant TV propaganda for his wino candidate. Sweeties of all ages turn tricks for campaign funds. Darlene gets her draperies. And the author settles scores:

“There is always depression on Election Night. . . . Your fate is always in the hands of some people who vote only because some illiterate tells them to, or because they are afraid of something, or because they’re mad about something, or because they happen to be passing the polling place on the way to the grocery store.”

If your arm is getting a little tired from waving that flag, you might want to give it a salubrious rest by picking up this book.

Next: John Wilkes reviews “Searching for Certainty: What Scientists Can Know About the Future” by John L. Casti (William Morrow & Co.).