NEW SPY
Mitgang, Herbert
NEW SPY THE MONTAUK FAULT by Herbert Mitgang Arbor House. 285 pp. $12.95. The old spy thrillers sound naive and dated these days. Herbert Mitgang has redefined the espionage novel for the 1980s....
...Negotiations are unthinkable at such a moment, for reasons never fully explained...
...Europe figures hardly at all...
...We are told that Linkum's son was killed in Vietnam, that Linkum knows the Pentagon and what it represents...
...One hopes the post-Vietnam audience is more savvy...
...Since everybody knows that words alone will never convince anyone, least of all the Russians, we have to demonstrate our power as well—shades of Hiroshima...
...What Mitgang does know and perhaps should have elevated from the status of a sub-plot is the newspaper world...
...Yet we are invited to believe that this is not the old mythology warmed over...
...The communications executives decide that hard news is a turnoff, upbeat lifestyles sell best, it's a mistake to write for America-haters here and abroad, and those who don't want to follow this pattern will be dismissed...
...Obviously the rest of the Earth doesn't count...
...The situation is critical, because Russia has a device which can cause geological disturbances on the other side of the globe, felling the lighthouse on Montauk Point, Long Island...
...In the new wave of spy novels, Russian is thrown in ostensibly for enhanced authenticity and prestige, but it is often mangled...
...The picture of the Soviets in The Montauk Fault is updated to a limited extent...
...I won't divulge the secret...
...The idea is to imitate daytime television...
...The clock in Chorley's office gives the time in Washington and Moscow...
...His hero in The Montauk Fault is Sam Linkum, a decent, middle-aged guy with even a few moral scruples...
...But the veneer is thin...
...It is all right for Pentagon Chorley to sound a little salty, but vulgarity from a lady executive is vulgar indeed...
...There were other language errors in Douglas Terman's novels, First Strike and Free Flight...
...But Linkum knows in his heart that it is a bilateral world and that we have to beat the Russians before they beat us...
...In short, the premises on which The Montauk Fault is built are depressingly familiar...
...The part of The Montauk Fault in which he describes the takeover of one paper by a commercial television network is, to my mind, more successful than the spy sequences...
...As a correspondent for The New York Times, he has probably had occasion to observe the effect of conglomerates on journalism...
...In The Montauk Fault, upravlenive is used instead of upravlenie, Nadejda instead of Nadezhda...
...The Montauk Faultis a novel for the slightly hip, who like love over forty without marriage, but leave the sexual, and political, roles intact...
...He is brought into a modern plot engineered not by the CIA, since everyone now knows that its agents are blunderers, but by the big boys with the smarts from the National Security Agency (NSA...
...With a chuckle, the Third World is dismissed as irrelevant...
...Or has he...
...Unfortunately, Mitgang cheapens his attack by casting a stereotypical, castrating female as the network hatchet man...
...If the language were French or German, writers might be more careful, but since it is Russian, who will ever know...
...The United Nations is mocked for its second-string diplomats with their speeches on colonialism and imperialism...
...Mitgang, too, evidently expects us to accept that piece of information without question...
...Karen Rosenberg (Karen Rosenberg teaches Russian at Williams College in Massachusetts...
...Clearly the only way to deal with the danger is to get a personal message to one of Russia's top operatives that we have a secret weapon too...
...When Chorley reports that the United States, when it demonstrated its secret weapon, killed nothing except a few goats, Linkum fails to raise an eyebrow, despite the fact that he is a veteran journalist...
...But we must judge not by words...
...Linkum's woman friend complains that there are few papers not under network control and while there are "still The Nation and The Progressive," it's a good idea to use a pseudonym when writing for them...
...Her last name is Zaremba, which is only slightly Russian-sounding, rather like calling an American Smish...
...Linkum's main Russian contact is a sympathetic-enough guy, no horns, but lurking in the background is a man-eating Soviet woman left over from Boris Badunov and Natasha cartoons...
...Mitgang's difficult job is to convince us that he has not written a historical novel about the 1950s...
...We're in a new ball game," says Hap Chorley from the NSA, "I'm not talking Cold War to you...
...If these are the new liberals, then save us from the neoconservatives...
...Linkum's woman friend does not allow her professionalism to consume her vivacity...
Vol. 45 • November 1981 • No. 11
