A CITY ON A HILL by GEORGE V. HIGGINS 256 pages. Knopf. $7.95.
Cavanaugh's wife leaves him at the end of this political novel. She says she will be spending her time in Los Angeles at her public relations job. "All that'll console me," says Cavanaugh, who has a granitic and totally unsupported optimism, "is that you'll be able to keep your tan." The lady replies: "The pool at the apartment is too close to the road." That is a George Higgins touch. No minor mercies admitted.
A City on a Hill is a departure for Higgins. It is not a thriller, and the characters are middle-class people. Cavanaugh works for a Boston Congressman named Sam Barry who fought U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. But now it is the '70s: Barry does not realize that he has outlived his issue. What he does know is that '76 looks like "Jackson and Ford, which I do not want." He sends Cavanaugh off on an exhausting political swing trying to gain support for an idealistic Democratic Senator. No one gives a damn.
Higgins is not a good political novelist, at least in the traditional sense. Nothing much actually happens. But perhaps the author wants to say that politics is a lot of stale talk. Watergate flows in the book like so much flotsam. "Liddy had 50 Minoltas," remarks one character idly. Cavanaugh is amused by the fact that Vatican money financed the Watergate apartment building: "Maybe I should pay closer attention to what Monsignor Lally writes in the Pilot."
Lines like that—Lally edited and wrote for the Boston diocesan paper for 45 years—are rare, and the fan of earlier books like The Friends of Eddie Coyle wishes there were more. Missing too is the sheer busyness of Higgins' gangster population, those lowlife figures that are highly polished miniatures. Half the new book is paragraph after paragraph spliced by "Cavanaugh said." But the substratum that marks all Higgins' work is intact: a dark, unpanicked vision of people being shuffled around, losing out—and talking about it.
PEKING MAN
by HARRY L. SHAPIRO 190 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.95.
THE SEARCH FOR PEKING MAN
by CHRISTOPHER G. JANUS with
WILLIAM BRASHLER 256 pages. Macmillan. $8.95.
With the possible exception of Martin Bormann, none of World War II's missing persons has been sought as assiduously as Peking Man, whose bones, unearthed from a quarry outside the Chinese capital in 1926, disappeared when the Japanese invaded the capital 15 years later. The two leading hunters have now written books. Christopher Janus, a Chicago businessman and amateur anthropologist, has spent a small fortune on the search. Professor Harry Shapiro, chairman emeritus of the American Museum of Natural History's department of anthropology, has been pursuing the missing bones ever since the war. In that time he has followed up scores of tips from strange people who are rarely willing to give their names. A typical phonecaller told Shapiro that the Peking Man is now held by an overseas Chinese businessman, but the informant refused to say more "because his tong would come and kill me."