FICTION

MEMORIAL BRIDGE by James Carroll (Houghton Mifflin: $22.95; 483 pp.). Sean Dillon, the no-nonsense young Irish hero of this novel, is clearly going to work in the bloody killing rooms of the Chicago stockyards only long enough to get his night-school law degree. He joins J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI during the Depression and makes his first order of business the destruction of the political gangsters dominating the stockyards. With his subsequent marriage to sprightly Cass Ryan, Dillon finds himself plunged into wartime counter-intelligence work and then, post-war, drafted to head a new military intelligence operation. The only disappointment in this otherwise well-crafted story is that it peaks too soon. It’s powerful stuff when Dillon is cracking the stockyards bosses, and when, new in Washington as a despised non-military outsider he suffers the dirty-tricks infighting between the services. But as Dillon’s military clout increases, as his son reaches college age, and as the Vietnam war racks the country, the crises facing the by-now unbending general assume, alas, a disappointing predictability.