ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 7, 1996 TAG: 9601050077
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY ROBERT P. HILLDRUP
BROTHERS NO MORE. By William F. Buckley Jr. Doubleday. $23.95.
William F. Buckley Jr. is a man who approaches the English language like a circus performer wrestling a large snake; despite many contortions, most of them for show, the snake is subdued in the end.
Anyone who has witnessed Buckley's narcissistic affair with his own voice on television, or put up with his ego-ridden narratives of sailing (let's leave his editorship of National Review out of this) can hardly be blamed for wondering if he can master his vice long enough to write a novel.
The answer, for the most part, is: Yes. And this latest novel is better than some of his earlier ones, an entertaining tale that reminds one of the late Irwin Shaw or the early Herman Wouk.
Buckley begins with an absolutely awful scene in which privileged Danny O'Hara (a grandson of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, no less) acts bravely in World War II combat while buddy Henry Chafee plays the coward. It is one of the most unconvincing portrayals of the military in recent fiction (Buckley doesn't even know how a rifle works, for example).
The chums go on to Yale (Buckley's alma mater), and travel back to Europe for a spot of sport at the casinos where Danny shows his dark side by murdering a blackmailer with Henry as an unknowing accomplice. The paths of the two then begin to separate, though Danny takes time out to marry Caroline, Henry's sister, a sensible lass but a Catholic convert, which means lots of babies. To console himself, Danny, by now a hotel magnate, takes up with a charming mistress.
Henry, meanwhile, goes into journalism and covers exciting things in Vietnam where, inexplicably, he is a coward no more. Danny, however, is back at home defrauding his boss and also the FDR Foundation. It's quite a scheme.
Things fall apart, however, and Buckley skillfully brings Danny and Henry to a last confrontation where all is revealed, particularly Henry's unwitting participation in the blackmailer's murder of long ago. The confrontation itself is soap opera script, and in that sense, the reader's destination turns out to have been less satisfying than the journey.
Buckley is a mischief-maker to the end, sprinkling his tale with lots of real people and real events, including, in one paragraph, even himself, and there are inside jokes and snide paybacks for those familiar with some of the personalities and events of a couple of decades past.
``Brothers No More'' is thus a bit of a romp, and an entertaining one for much of the way, provided you can ignore such inconsistencies as a fatal bullet wound to the back on one page which becomes - same bullet, same dead man - a bullet wound to the stomach on the next page.
One suspects sheer carelessness, but with Buckley, it's never safe to be certain.
Robert HIlldrup is a Richmond writer and former newspaperman.
LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: William Buckley|by CNB