ADVISE AND CONSENT (616 pp.)Allen DruryDoubleday ($5.75).
Most novelists know so little about real-life politicians that they could not and should not dare take a crack at a political novel. No novelist, but a knowing man on the subject of politicians, Allen Drury, U.S. Senate correspondent for the New York Times, thus stepped into a near vacuum in U.S. letters. His Advise and Consent is the August Book-of-the-Month Club choice, and Author Drury thought he could afford to be adamant when the B.O.M. asked him to cut his great prose pudding. So it comes to the reader with all its fat intact,...