THE NATIONAL ANTHEM

This trash-compacted novel is ""veeery heavy"" on words like heavy and on the Washington scene as the Watergate hearings break, and there are all the names of everybody who was anybody then. Our girl is Nona, free-lancing for Metro Magazine (read New York) and trying to help her lover Michael, part of the radical collective in The Movement they shared along with each other. Michael has stolen some FBI files, jumped $100,000 bail, and disappeared. But back in the busy swim of the dirty pool that's making news, she meets another reporter, Tony Lewellen, the most glamorous gun in town after ""the soft dough of his sex"" firms up. From then on her affair with Tony gets more coverage than the low politics or polite extortion (even her editor is contemptible) and you never really know what's going to be released where. Enough--be it said that this is the kind of novel the late Jackie Susann could have written about Watergate even if you're left wondering whether ""Elisburg"" knew about the ""nookie room at the top of the Capitol building."" The twilight's last gleaning?